Ever sit in a café and cry?
It’s a moment, for sure. I know everyone is going through something, and I only hope we can face it with grace and integrity. Clearly, that ability is harder to practice than it is to type, but it feels absolutely necessary.
I’m sitting in a café writing my first book ever. It is my Black Girl From Eugene podcast transcribed, and the stories in between. It’s wild to have your life in your own words played back to you. All the memories and feelings come flooding back at once.
I was never performing or trying to convey anything that wasn’t honest, so the experience truly resonates within my transformation. It covers the passing of my mother and of my father. It is so deeply painful to revisit these moments in my life and the final moments of theirs. Yet in the full weight of that loss, I know how deeply fortunate I am to have had the relationship we had. The relationship we still have.
My dad was a historian, a Black man to his core, with a deep, disciplined focus on understanding and challenging the dynamics of Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism. His studies were his gift to his children. Not the kind of learning measured by grades or degrees, but the kind that comes from spirit and settles into your bones and changes how you see everything. A living curriculum passed down during dinner conversations, through quick correlations between the history and the jazz blaring from the car windows. There was a particular way he’d pause before answering a question, like the truth deserved the right entrance.
Earlier this year, the Voting Rights Act was gutted in a move he predicted over 20 years ago. I recall him telling me: “An act is just an act, only good until they decide to stop pretending.”
I had no idea what he meant at the time. As I grew and learned how institutional violence actually works, how it plays out in front of our faces, masquerading as hope and justice while serving only those who accumulate more power at the direct expense of their victims. It all came into focus. The guise has always been: As long as you aren’t the worst, you have a chance to be the best.
Smoke and mirrors. How did anyone become the worst? Compared to what, exactly?
We can trace this back to counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a human being to shape elections. The Electoral College. Districting. None of it was ever designed to maintain power within the people. I am utterly disappointed, not surprised, but disappointed because the trail of evidence has always been clear. Because we can cosplay elegance in cheap fast fashion, we are willing to witness the erosion of personal choice altogether, as long as the aesthetic holds.
I want to go back, knowing we cannot.
What we cannot afford, moving forward, is to be satisfied with gestures: A symbolic vote. A renamed street. A statement of solidarity that costs nothing and changes nothing.
Accountability is not aesthetic. Change is not a press release. We have been offered the performance of progress while the architecture of power remains entirely untouched. The disappointment is not only in what they have done, it is in how little we have demanded in return. How many times we accepted the gesture and called it a win? That ends now. Real earned wisdom does not negotiate with illusion.
My dad taught us that we are all connected and that nothing we do, and nothing they do, fails to affect us all. And he would say it plainly, like it was the most obvious thing in the world: “Wisdom eliminates choice.”
He wasn’t talking about restriction. He was talking about clarity. Real wisdom transforms what you’re even willing to choose between. When you truly know something about yourself, about history, about the systems designed to consume you, certain doors stop looking like doors. The choice was never really a choice. Wisdom just has the courage to say so.
That lens, once received, cannot be unseen.
The answer has always been in the story. In our collective story.
Where did we lose this plot?
Ayisha Elliott is an executive leadership coach and founder of Black Girl From Eugene LLC, BlackGirlfromEugene.substack.com. Through internationally recognized coaching and organizational strategy, she helps leaders close the gap between intention and impact — deconstructing white supremacy culture within workplace culture.