We Were Told This Would Be Enough
It isn't. On credentials, capital, and the only thing they can't take from you.
They Removed the Degrees from Their Résumés. What four Black women in Arkansas are teaching us about credentials, capital, and what actually protects you.
The Washington Post recently spent time with four Black women in Little Rock, Arkansas. Among them: nine higher education degrees. Combined years of government service, corporate management, health equity leadership, and project management. Not one steady paycheck.
Their names are Kia Mills, Aaliyah McShane, Shakia Jackson, and Chemeka Cooper. They are 29, 35, 45, and educated well past what this economy seems willing to reward.
I want to talk about them and I want to talk to you.
The credential contract is broken
Since the 1970s, the operating assumption for Black Americans who wanted to build economic stability was straightforward: education plus work ethic plus time equals access. The unemployment gap between Black and White Americans was persistent, but the path was legible. Go to college. Get the degree. Climb the ladder.
The women in Little Rock did exactly that. McShane earned two master’s degrees while working her way up through state and federal government over seven years. Mills became the first person in her family to earn a college degree and then went back for a master’s in criminal justice. Jackson ran a state health equity office with a staff of ten. Cooper managed projects at Blue Cross Blue Shield and then a tech company.
And then, one by one, they were out.
The mechanism differed for each of them — DOGE cuts, DEI rollbacks, insurance industry downsizing, a restructuring here, a layoff there. But the pattern is the same one Marc Morial of the National Urban League described in that piece: “They went to college; they climbed the corporate ladder and voilà they’re out of work.”
The Black unemployment rate is back to 7.2 percent. White unemployment sits at 3.6. That 2-to-1 ratio, which had narrowed to 1.6-to-1 by the end of the Biden administration, snapped back within a year.
But what makes this moment different from prior recessions isn’t just the speed of the deterioration. It’s who is being hit.
This is not primarily a story about the working class. This is a story about the Black professional class — the women who were told that degrees and government service and corporate tenure were the armor. They found out the armor had terms and conditions they were never shown.
The detail that should concern us all …
At a certain point in the article, the reporter notes something almost in passing.
These women, with master’s degrees, with years of management experience, with professional credentials, started removing their degrees from their résumés.
Not because they weren’t qualified. Because employers were using their qualifications as a reason not to call them back. Overqualified. Too expensive. A flight risk. The thing that was supposed to open doors had become the reason the door stayed closed.
Cooper, who had an MBA and years of project management experience, was being told by employers that she was overqualified. She went to a career adviser, who told her there were no jobs that would meet her salary expectations.
“If I’m applying for the job, I need the job,” Cooper said.
I’ve been in enough rooms, courtrooms, conference rooms, negotiating rooms, to know what is actually happening in that exchange. The credential signals a level of compensation that the system has quietly decided Black women shouldn’t be able to demand. So instead of offering the job at the rate the qualification warrants, the market simply filters them out.
The credential doesn’t protect you. In some markets, it penalizes you.
That is the broken contract. And the women in Little Rock are living inside its wreckage.
What Shakia Jackson understood
Here’s the moment in the article that matters most to me.
Shakia Jackson, whose entire department was eliminated when the state of Arkansas dismantled its Office of Health Equity, did not wait to be rehired. She started a consulting business. And then she turned to her friends and asked them directly:
“All of us here right now, with all our skills and all our talent, we could do so much. Why are you not doing project management? Why are you not consulting?”
Cooper answered honestly: “It’s more of a fear of not being able to do something well. What would I do it in? How would I approach it? Where do I start?”
That exchange is the whole conversation. And it is the conversation I have been building infrastructure around for years.
Because Shakia’s question — why are you not consulting? — is the right question. But Cooper’s answer is also true. The expertise is there. The years are there. The results are there. What’s missing is the architecture: how to position it, how to package it, how to price it, how to sell it, how to make it generate income that doesn’t disappear when a governor signs an executive order or a DOGE spreadsheet eliminates your department.
Expertise is an asset. But only if you know how to build the business around it.
That’s the difference between Shakia’s instinct and Cooper’s fear. Not capability, not credibility, but a structural question that nobody taught them how to answer.
What this moment is actually asking of you
If you are a credentialed Black woman, in government, in corporate, in the nonprofit sector, and you have watched this year unfold with a particular kind of dread, I want to name what that dread is pointing at.
It is not imposter syndrome. It is not a lack of confidence. It is the accurate recognition that the system you built your career inside was never designed to hold you permanently. It was designed to use your expertise for as long as that use was convenient and to release you the moment the political or economic calculation changed.
That is not a personal failure. That is a structural fact.
And the appropriate response to a structural fact is a structural answer.
The structural answer is this: your expertise does not belong to your employer. It does not belong to a department title or a federal job code or a corporate org chart. It is yours. It is an asset class. And you can learn to build a business around it that no executive order can dismantle.
That is not wishful thinking. That is what I do, and what I teach, and what I have built a platform specifically to help Black women do.
Article inspiration: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/06/28/why-black-college-graduates-are-struggling-find-jobs-trumps-economy/
Displaced to In Demand — July 30th
On July 30th at 12pm ET, I’m hosting a free masterclass.
It is for the woman who has the degrees and the years and the results and is done waiting for an institution to decide her expertise is worth compensating.
We are going to talk about what it actually takes to build the business behind your expertise: how to position what you know, how to package it into offers, how to price it based on the value you create — not the salary band you used to sit in.
If Kia or Aaliyah or Shakia or Chemeka found this, I would want them in that room.
If you found this, I want you in it too.
Register at www.displacedtoindemand.com.
Bring every degree. Every title. You will never have to erase a credential to make yourself easier to accept. Not here. The business you build from your expertise won't ask you to shrink your résumé to walk through the door.
About the Author:
Kelly Charles-Collins is the Founder of Octagon Haus, Octagon Experts Bureau,, and Mogul Operating System, where she helps experts transform what they know into authority, enterprise, and economic power. A speaker, author, and former trial attorney, Kelly writes and speaks about communication, leadership, reinvention, and expertise-driven business. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Authority Magazine, and on ABC, CBS, and NBC.