When Coco Gauff appeared in Miu Miu’s latest campaign sitting on a tennis court with natural hair, sporting a red polo, and touting a brown leather bag, the internet split in two. One side saw a young Black woman radiating confidence and authenticity in a space that rarely makes room for her. The other side offered what Black women have received time and time again: the suggestion that, as she is, she is not quite right.

I recognized that split immediately. Not as a bystander, but as someone who lives inside it.

I am the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. A dark-skinned Black woman with natural hair who also aspires to work in healthcare leadership. For much of my adult life, I have confused “looking put together” with looking less like myself. To be polished is to have smoother hair when in a weave, kinky straight wig, or a silk press. Or organized in plaits, braids clean and refined, usually held behind me in a neat ponytail. Altogether more controlled. More palatable. More “appropriate” to appease a gaze not designed with me in mind. That gaze follows us in spaces where competence is measured, sizing us up before we’ve said a thing.

The word “polished” carries a quiet violence when applied to Black women. It rarely means skilled, prepared, or confident—though we are all of those things and more. It means how closely does she approximate an aesthetic built from European features? How much of herself has she agreed to leave at the door to enter the space? In professional settings, the answer turns out to be measurable and costly. Black women’s hair is 2.5 times more likely to be perceived as unprofessional than that of white women. Two-thirds change their hair target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">one in four believes she’s already been passed over for a job because of it. 

Coco didn’t leave anything at the door. And the backlash proved to be exactly what many of us already know: the luxury fashion world, like the boardroom, like the office space, or in medicine, like the hospital corridor, has a default image of what sophistication looks like and it was not built to include us as we naturally are.

Comparisons I saw invoked Ruby Bridges–some for her clothing, others for her hair–meant appallingly as an insult. It’s a critique that amounts to a confession of internalized bias. If a world-ranked athlete in a luxury editorial reads to you as a poor child in Jim Crow South, then what you’ve admitted is that natural Black hair signals lack.

I’ve also come across the counter-argument: This is really a class conversation, that Coco’s aesthetic is Martha’s Vineyard ease, old money unstudied, and that some of the backlash is intra-community policing of who gets to represent that. There is something real there. The clean girl look, the baddie aesthetic, full glam… these are not arbitrary preferences. They are ways of hinting at care and investment in a world that audits Black women’s appearance constantly and renders a verdict on their worth. But I am not willing to let the class framing dissolve the racial architecture underneath. The Martha’s Vineyard signifier passes as acceptable in luxury spaces because it approximates something historically associated with whiteness. After all, the original hierarchy remains at work.

There is a particular grief in being a high-achieving Black woman who has internalized this. You work harder, prepare more thoroughly, lead with more grace than is ever required of your peers and still find yourself wondering whether your hair is the problem. I’ve sat in rooms and felt genuine anxiety that how I look might be the variable undermining my credibility, not my preparation nor my clinical judgement. The anxiety, it turns out, is not paranoia but pattern recognition. Over 20% of Black women have been sent home from work because of their hair. The CROWN Act, which would prohibit race-based hair discrimination federally, has still not passed in the United States, leaving over 4 million employed Black people with no legal recourse or protections. The cost of compliance in the meantime goes beyond appearances; chemical straightening can run hundreds of dollars per session and recent studies have now linked those same products to increased risk of breast and uterine cancer. This is not just a cultural conversation, it becomes a material one that has professional consequences for Black women.

None of this is new. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined “respectability politics” in 1993 to describe the survival strategy imposed on Black communities after Reconstruction; it’s the way to present yourself to white society to perhaps earn safety. It was never a free choice; it was a tax. And its most insidious feature is that it doesn’t stay external; it becomes internalized until we begin levying it on each other.

But I’ve started to ask different questions. Not how do I fit, but who decided the shape of the space? Not am I enough, but for whom was “enough” defined and why did I accept their definition? A whole continent exists where the majority looks like me. Where my features are not exotic or disqualifying but simply human. That is something I hold onto.

The Coco Gauff campaign, and the predictable fury it provoked, is not really about a tennis player or a handbag. It is about whose presence the world has agreed to treat as aspirational. Higginbotham named it in 1993, the natural hair movement has been relitigating it for fifteen years, and we have declared multiple turning points. And yet here we are in 2026. The exhaustion of that repetition is itself data.

As healthcare leaders, as executives, as artists, as mothers, as athletes, as friends, no matter who we are or where we operate, Black women have always had to decide: do we advance by shrinking ourselves into a shape the room already recognizes? Or do we advance as we are and force the room to expand?

I know what I want to choose. And I am also still learning, in therapy and in life, that this choice is not a compromise of my professionalism. It is the fullest expression of it.

We are not failing to be polished. The definition of polish has been failing us.

Rachel Bervell, MD, MPH, is a psychiatry resident in New Orleans and founder of The Black ObGyn Project, a platform dedicated to educating and advocating for Black reproductive health and equity. A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, in partnership with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice and Every Page Foundation, she has keynoted at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has been featured in Time and on NPR, and her writing has appeared in The Grio, Louisiana Illuminator, The Lens, and for Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health.

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