When the friendship between the women behind the popular lifestyle blog Six Brown Chicks fell apart, their blog did too. Suddenly, these dynamic women — authors, business owners, philanthropists and relationship counselors who came together with a vision of empowering other women through their combined testimonies — were divided on seemingly everything.
Their disputes became very public and eventually their blog shut down and their bonds were broken. The situation became so intense that the blog’s creator, author and journalist Zondra Hughes, reached out to inspirational guru Iyanla Vanzant for help understanding what went wrong. “I wanted an autopsy of the Six Brown Chicks’ sudden death,” Hughes tells us. Vanzant and the cameras from her hit OWN show Iyanla Fix My Life stepped in to help. Vanzant invited all six ladies to come together for a weekend and requested that they stay together, like it or not, until they came clean with each other and dissected their issues. “Their circumstantial evidence painted me as the primary suspect,” Hughes adds.
When Vanzant urged them to look at why their friendship fell apart and how they could move forward together, viewers watched along as the women revealed feelings of betrayal and heartbreak. It was moving to watch six girlfriends and former business partners open up about the immense pain that backstabbing and gossip can cause, and the emotional scars the ordeal left them with — one being distrust in the whole idea of sisterhood.
Many of the heated moments aired on that Fix My Life episode late last year concerned the Six Brown Chicks’ fans, who wondered if their friendship or their professional ties could actually survive once the cameras stopped rolling. They hoped they would continue to heal together and rebuild their business. So what happened post-Iyanla? Today the Six Brown Chicks blog is back up and running with a hot new look and a group of sisters and bloggers with new attitudes inspiring readers once again. Hughes, relationship columnist Gina B., relationship educator Yanni Brown, activist Dr. Dawj, playwright Shoya, and spoken word artist Kayann Comeaux are once again working together as a team. We checked in with the ladies to find out what they learned from each other, their thoughts on their experience on the show and how to bounce back after failing before you’ve had a chance to succeed.
Photos: Isi Akahome