In our world, Black women are a total standard of excellence. The style, the grace, the melanin, the beauty! But the wider world we live in doesn’t always see it the same way. External projections and false narratives often try to position Black women in a less favorable light rather than acknowledging and honoring our natural state of glory.

One of the core reasons that Precious Stroud started BlackFemaleProject was to offer guidance and insights for younger Black women, in hopes that they’ll be better prepared to navigate their professional journeys. While we all have to learn our own preferences and limitations through experience, many of us would have benefited from more transparent information about what patterns we might encounter.

We all have varied levels of comfort speaking up. For some of us, it requires a serious pep talk to psych ourselves up to be comfortable sharing what’s really on our minds. For others, it’s second nature and often the easier alternative to keeping our thoughts to ourselves. Many of us likely fall somewhere between these two extremes, and no matter what our general comfort level is, different contexts and situations can impact how prone we are to speak up in any given moment.

BlackFemaleProject emerged organically in response to the pervasive and systemic barriers that Black women face in conventional workplaces. This system was not designed with our well-being in mind. Unless we’re stepping into spaces that were designed by us and for us, there’s a good chance we’ll face circumstances and institutionalized oppressions intended to discourage us and lead us to reconsider our paths. Sometimes, that reconsideration might be just what we need. But what’s crucial is that we’re able to make our own decisions about what we want rather than allowing the system to strip us of our agency and lead us astray.

As human beings in general—and especially as Black women—we have the gift of endless examples of those who came before us overcoming the most dire of circumstances, guided by faith in something greater than the here and now. We don’t take for granted what it means for our ancestors to have stayed the course through adversity so that we could have the opportunity to live.

Many of us experience the feeling of being expected to dim our light in order to fit in or get along. At BlackFemaleProject, we believe that compromising our authenticity in this way is not only a disservice to ourselves, but also to our community and the world around us. Think about an orchestra. It’s the variety and distinctness among the different instruments that creates the beauty, depth, and richness of the music. Imagine what an orchestra full of one instrument or playing only one note would sound like. Harmony is beautiful, and only truly arises from cooperation among difference…