Coco Cree

Pressed. Braided. Loc’d. Faded. Twisted. Wrapped. Natural. Wigged. Weaved. Bald. Beaded. Cornrowed. Picked out. Pixie cut. Slicked back. In bantu knots. In a silk press.

I remember sitting in horror during my 1L year of law school as our career services staff told us that we would not get a job with locs–as I sat there with freshly retwisted dreadlocs.
The problem was never our hair. 

The problem was the systems that decided professionalism had to look like proximity to whiteness. Black hair does not need to be “tamed” to be appropriate.

Our hair is not a distraction. Edge control isn’t policy. It is acceptable because it is ours. Black is Professional.

I never felt like an imposter.

Not because I was never questioned. I was.
Not because I was always welcomed. I was not.

But because I knew the people counting on me to doubt myself were often mediocre.

Sometimes what gets called imposter syndrome is actually institutional gaslighting.

Black women are not walking around feeling like frauds because we lack ability. We are navigating rooms that benefit from us questioning what we already know.

You earned your seat. You know your work so refuse to internalize somebody else’s discomfort with your competence.

Because what happens to us is not random.

That phrase came out of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s. The point was simple but radical: the things women were told were “personal problems” were actually connected to systems of power.

And that still applies.

The way Black women are spoken to at work, doubted in rooms, punished for tone, expected to overperform, underpaid, overworked, and then told to be grateful, that is not just personal.

That is structure. That is culture. That is power trying to make itself look like personality conflict.

We’re naming it accurately. Black is professional.

When you can pull anything off💋
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