Music

Solange Knowles Has Written A Powerful Essay About Being Black In Predominately White Spaces

At a concert last night, Knowles and her family had trash thrown at them for dancing.

by Sinead Stubbins  12 September 2016

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Solange Knowles has taken to Twitter to discuss a hostile experience she had at a Kraftwerk concert in New Orleans last night. Knowles — who was accompanied by her 11-year-old son, her husband and a friend — said that while she was dancing:“4 older white women yell to me from behind ‘Sit down now.’ I tell them I’m dancing at a concert. They yell, ‘you need to sit down now’,”.

When she kept dancing, one of the women threw a lime at her. Many of her tweets have since been deleted (you can still read them here) but she also wrote a piece on her website about how people of colour are treated differently in predominately white spaces and how this ‘othering’ is constantly minimised.

The piece called ‘And Do You Belong? I Do’ details what happened at the concert and how it echoes other experiences that Knowles has had, with her saying that she’s not surprised that people on social media immediately clapped back to tell her that she was overreacting:

You hear women yell aggressively, “Sit down now, you need to sit down right now” from the box behind you. You want to be considerate, however, they were not at all considerate with their tone, their choice of words, or the fact that you just walked in and seem to be enjoying yourself. 

You were planning on sitting down after this song… You feel something heavy hit you on the back of your shoulder, but consider that you are imagining things because well…. certainly a stranger would not have the audacity. Moments later, you feel something again, this time smaller, less heavy, and your son and his friend tell you those ladies just hit you with a lime.

Knowles describes wanting to make these women “accountable” for their actions, while knowing that “when you share this that a part of the population is going to side with the women who threw trash at you. You know that they will come up with every excuse to remove that huge part of the incident and make this about you standing up at a concert ‘blocking someone’s view’.”

The piece is about the unspoken discomfort that people of colour regularly experience when they are singled out for being disruptive or are simply not afforded the same rights as white people. Knowles gives examples of incidents big and small which present black people as ‘the other’ and details how when black people speak out about this, they are labelled as aggressive.

“You and your friends have been called the N word, been approached as prostitutes, and have had your hair touched in a predominately white bar just around the corner from the same venue,” she writes.

“You’d like to use the classic “I have many white friends” line to prove that you do not dislike white people but dislike the way that many white people are constantly making you feel. To combat headlines like “Solange feels uncomfortable with white people” but know that there is no amount of explaining that you will do to get through to this type of person in the first place.”