My Love Letter to Black Women

This isn't a think piece. It's exactly what the title says.

A love letter.

I have a Black mother. A Black wife. A Black daughter. More Black women in my family than I can count, and every single one of them has left a mark on me that nothing else could. I've had Black women friends who kept it real with me when nobody else would. Who told me the truth whether I wanted it or not. Who checked me when I needed to be checked and showed up for me when I didn't deserve it.

I've been watching Black women my whole life. Up close. In the house I grew up in. At the kitchen table. Through hard seasons and good ones. And I don't need data or research or outside confirmation to say what I already know.

That's not hyperbole. That's testimony.

Black women hold things together that would fall apart without them. Not sometimes. Consistently. They carry weight that was never supposed to be theirs alone. They love hard. They love loyal. They tell the truth when the truth costs something. They push you toward the version of yourself you've been avoiding. They pray for you when they're running on empty. They fight for the people they love with everything they've got left.

And the world still asks more of them.

That's always bothered me. The gap between what Black women give and what comes back to them. The way they get celebrated in theory and overlooked in practice. The way the word strong gets put on them not as a compliment but as permission to keep taking without giving rest in return.

My mother showed me what it looks like to love a family without keeping score. My wife has been my partner, my mirror, my person through every season. My daughter is the reason I write what I write. She deserves to grow up in a world where women who look like her are chosen. Pursued. Written as the whole point of the story, not the supporting role in somebody else's.

That's what I was building when I wrote Kiana Mercer in Into You.

Kiana plans weddings because she genuinely believes love is worth everything. She's not naive. She's not fragile. She's the kind of woman who has looked at love clearly, with both eyes open, and decided it's worth choosing anyway. That takes more strength than most people will ever have.

Darius doesn't see it at first. He's a divorce attorney. His whole life is what happens when love falls apart. He's built a perfectly reasonable case against it. Then he meets Kiana and runs out of arguments.

Not because she fixed him. Because she was herself. Completely and without apology. And that was enough.

Not because they need a man to be complete. But because they spend so much time being everything for everybody else that somebody ought to write the version where the love comes back to them.

We'd be nothing without them. I mean that down to the ground.

This is my small way of saying so.