When the Mask Was Given: Inherited & Earned Armor Worn With Intention — Part IV

Before I understood the word armor, I was already wearing it.

In undergrad at East Carolina University, I was a peer educator. I loved it. It was the first time I felt clear about what I was called to do — health education, promotion, and prevention work. That role shaped my career trajectory.

After graduation, I secured a graduate teaching assistantship. Then another. I worked both, not for prestige, but to survive. To support myself. To help care for my sister and younger brother.

I was less than six credit hours from completing my master’s degree when a full-time health educator position opened.

I was already doing the work.

The team had transitioned. I was facilitating, teaching, programming, and carrying responsibilities beyond my title. So I applied.

I interviewed.

And then I heard nothing.

Later, I learned that peers in my same graduate program — some who had never worked on campus the way I had were being interviewed for the role.

Eventually, I received an offer.

But it came with commentary.

“We’re going to offer you the job… but someone said you didn’t interview well. That you didn’t talk well enough. That you didn’t look the part.”

The excitement of the offer lasted about thirty seconds.

I couldn’t even fully celebrate.

Later that week, someone without even an associate’s degree questioned how I got the job, while I was completing my master’s.

That was my entry into the full-time workforce.

And it was my first real lesson in how perception travels faster than preparation.

Years later, I was called into my supervisor’s office and told that rumors were circulating that I wasn’t doing my job.

The source? A colleague who once mentored me, now a peer, who did not like hearing my name mentioned more than theirs. At a football tailgate, inebriated, they told others in student health that I wasn’t carrying my weight.

That casual, reckless conversation traveled up the chain and became a professional threat.

Months of scrutiny followed.

I eventually secured another role at UNC Charlotte and left before it escalated further. But I will never forget how fragile professional security felt after that.

Then came the smoke-free campus campaign I led.

I developed the concept. Led it independently. Created the mock-up. “Breathe Easy.”

When marketing printed the yard signs, someone omitted the “e.” The signs read “Breath Easy.”

My student workers placed them across campus as mapped. The error wasn’t caught until after distribution.

And suddenly, that typo — one I did not make — became shorthand for my competence.

Years later, when my supervisor retired, and I was already doing the director-level work, I didn’t even receive an interview.

Not because I lacked skill.

But because of perception.

Because someone “would never work for me.”

Not because I was incapable, but because they didn’t like me.

That is how armor is forged.

Not in dramatic collapses.

But in accumulated moments where your excellence is questioned, your presence misread, and your character debated in rooms you are not in.

I used to believe these dynamics happened at the beginning of a career.

I learned they can happen at every level, even near the top.

And what I also learned is this:

The armor I built at the bottom of the organizational chart did not evolve as I climbed it.

There is a difference between the mask you craft for yourself and the one handed to you before you ever understood why.

Some of us chose our armor.

Some of us inherited it.

And some of us earned it the hard way.

Not every mask began as strategy.

Some began as instruction.

The First Lessons

No one sat me down and said, “Here is your mask.”

But the lessons were clear:

Be strong. Don’t cry in public. Work twice as hard. Don’t give them a reason. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be too soft. Don’t be too much.

And if you are a Black woman, you know these lessons rarely arrive as cruelty. They arrive as protection.

They are whispered through love. Passed down as survival codes.

Your grandmother didn’t call it armor. Your mother didn’t label it emotional intelligence.

But somewhere between “act right” and “don’t let them see you sweat,” the mask was being fitted.

Armor as Inheritance

There is generational intelligence embedded in how we were taught to navigate.

For Black families, for marginalized communities, for those who have known economic precarity or social instability — presentation was never trivial.

It was safety.

You learned early that how you show up could shift outcomes. Those missteps could cost you more than others.

So you were given armor before you knew you would need it.

Inherited armor is not a weakness.

It is collective memory. History encoded into behavior. Wisdom shaped by consequence.

But armor handed down without space to examine it can become heavy.

What protected one generation may constrict another.

Armor as Earned

Some masks were not inherited.

They were forged.

After betrayal. After being overlooked. After being labeled. After being misread. After being punished for honesty.

There are rooms that teach you to harden.

Systems that teach you to calculate before you speak.

Losses that teach you to guard joy.

Earned armor is not tradition.

It is a reaction.

And often, it is the only thing that made staying possible.

The Cost of Wearing What Was Never Examined

The danger is not that we have armor.

The danger is that we never question it.

If strength was rewarded and softness penalized, how would you know tenderness was still allowed?

If vigilance kept you safe, how would you know when you no longer needed to be on guard?

Over time, inherited and earned armor blur.

You stop remembering where it started.

You just know you cannot take it off.

And slowly, what was meant to protect begins to shape identity.

For Black Women — Let’s Name the Specificity

We were not only given armor.

We were praised for wearing it well.

The strong one. The dependable one. The resilient one. The one who handles it.

Resilience became currency. Composure became expectation. Endurance became identity.

But what happens when the armor fuses to your skin?

What happens when you are admired for surviving but not supported in healing?

Was this strength chosen — or required? Was this mask strategic — or inherited? Does it still serve you now?

Discernment as Reclamation

Discernment returns not as survival, but as choice.

You are allowed to examine what was handed to you.

You are allowed to honor the intention behind it and still decide it no longer fits.

You are allowed to thank the version of you that earned your armor and still set some of it down.

This is not dishonoring your elders.

It is evolution.

Protection was necessary.

But permanence is not required.

Closing the Mask — Opening Agency

Where the mask kept us alive, our agency will help us live — and thrive.

Grateful for inherited armor. Grateful for ancestors. Grateful for the women — known and unknown — who endured so we could exhale.

The mask was never foolishness.

It was formation.

But now, we are not only inheritors of resilience.

We are authors of legacy.

What if we use the lessons learned from the mask not just to survive, but to shift systems?

To inhale faith. To exhale fear. To build structures where safety is shared, not rationed.

We are purposefully and perfectly positioned.

Not just to endure history.

But to shape it.

Heading Into March

As we close February, I want to pause.

This month, we named the mask. Defended discernment. Questioned inherited self-worth. Examined armor given and earned.

None of it was accidental.

Black History Month is about context about honoring the intelligence embedded in survival.

The mask was not a weakness.

It was history responding to the environment.

But history explains.

It does not have to be defined.

As we move into Women’s History Month, the question shifts:

Not only, What was I given?

But, What am I choosing now?

Coming next: Choosing What I Carry Forward: Agency as the Goal

Reflection

What parts of your mask were handed to you?

What parts did you forge yourself?

What did they protect you from?

And what might they be preventing now?