A Seat at Solange’s Table
BETTINA L. LOVE AND SARAH ABDELAZIZ
Education is often conceived within the bounds of the classroom. It emanates from textbooks, and through those entitled “Ms.,” “Mrs.,” “Professor.” The academy, or the institution of education, requires certain patterns of speech and methods of relation. Some professors and students may attempt to break these restraints, but the institution is an overall homogenizing force, rewarding certain bodies, while disciplining others (Berry & Mizelle, 2006; Evans, 2008; Fleming, 1983; Kim, 2003). Blackness, queerness, and womanness are unprivileged in the academy. Even in spaces that seemingly appreciate it, such as Black Studies or Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies, aggressions erupt within and from outside. Meanwhile, Black women in the academy find their lives, vigor, and intellectualism budding not only within the binds of textbooks and the PDFs of peer-reviewed journals, but at dinner tables, in bars, at rallies, and on the radio (Evans, Taylor, Dunlap, & Miller, 2009; Gutiérrez y Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012). Social Justice Education recognizes that much of what influences us and creates us is beyond the confines of a book or a classroom (Freire, 1985; hooks, 1994). We want to privilege here the arts, and how music has been a forum for Black women to practice social justice and education. Specifically, we want to privilege the most recent album by Solange: A Seat at the Table.
Solange’s A Seat at the Table is, for us, an exemplar of Black woman–led, social justice education. Solange Knowles, of the famous Knowles clan, was immersed in various forms of sonic art from childhood and has been a recording artist for close to 2 decades. However, A Seat at the Table, released in September of 2016, is arguably her magnum opus. The 21-track album is a bookend and the continuance of a conversation on Blackness in America, and a nod, specifically, to the joyful arduousness of womanhood within that space. A Seat at the Table occupies a space of love, celebration, anger, sorrow, and playfulness. The 21 tracks weave in and out of masterful songs that are delicately named, songs such as “Weary,” “Mad,” “F.U.B.U,” “Cranes in the Sky,” “Don’t Touch My Hair,” “Rise,” and “Where Do We Go.” We believe that Solange created a beautiful conversation among Black women in a moment that has been increasingly opening the conversation of the violability of being Black into the larger, visible, public sphere. The dual importance of Solange as Black and as a woman is of increasing importance, as social justice movements tend to exclude the feminized, even when they are the originators of movements.1
A Seat at the Table makes a profound and lasting intervention. The space that Solange occupies as the public figure of a highly recognizable family makes the conversation provoked by her album public, yet by simultaneously centering the album on Black women, Solange creates more intimate spaces within the larger audience, allowing conversations amongst one another to emerge. Our analysis of Solange’s lyrics and album cover engages with the long tradition of Black popular music serving as a “primary vehicle for communally derived critiques of the African-American experience” (Neal, 1998, xi). For this reason, so much of Black popular music narrates America’s anti-Blackness, the sensibilities of Blackness that emerge from racial trauma, and joys of being Black despite America’s insistence on oppression. We enter the work as cultural critics with a deep understanding and appreciation for how Black cultural creativity provides “modes of cultural excellence in an ethos of white disbelief in Black humanity” (Dyson, 1993, xiv).
Upon first glance, A Seat at the Table is already complex and intriguing. The title of the album invites a certain type of understanding: Arguably, “a seat at the table” implies a question. Having a seat at the table invites ideas of inclusivity and democracy and all of the problematic ways with which these ideologies propose, but do not instate, equality. The phrase “a seat at the table” does not question the notion of a table, but perhaps even validates it, as though getting a seat at the table will dismantle hundreds of years of oppression or as though it will dismantle the table itself, or structures that bind, constrain, kill. “A seat at the table” might be a necessary step toward invalidating structures of oppression at its best, but at its worst, it enlivens the structure, allowing a legitimacy to persist in that which has always been broken. And yet … our first sight of the album is Solange, hair clips in hair, unwaveringly looking at us, face unadorned. A Black woman in a space so naked and politicized: hair being done.
Intimate, but not vulnerable, Solange appears to us powerful, in control. Somehow, due to the way she has positioned her head, she looks down at us ever so slightly. She is making it very clear that she has us fastened within her gaze. Already the album occupies a space of dissonance. The idea of a seat at the table conjures social justice as reform, similarly to how the notion of “speaking truth to power” does. This is the album’s first foray into a space that allows for seeming impossibilities to co-exist; a theme that can be observed throughout the volume of songs. Simultaneously, the sight of Solange’s face occupies politicized spaces of rejection, acceptance, and defiance. The simple act of appearing in such a way is politicized in its refusal of certain norms. We could perhaps imagine this image in twinness with young, Black, feminine Panthers emerging with their afros, loudly declaring Black as beautiful. The album picture flies in the face of binding norms such as Eurocentrism, and the often violent way with which the image of “woman” is manicured and maintained. It is from the first glance then that Solange begins her process of social justice education. She allows us to gaze at her in a space that has been much contested—a Black woman’s hair—and from within that space, she emanates love for family and defiance toward her enemies.
The first song on the album, “Rise,” includes the repeated refrain,
Fall in your ways so you can crumble
Fall in your ways so you can sleep at night
Fall in your ways so you can wake up and rise
The title of the song, “Rise,” is seemingly in opposition to the motif of falling. Once again, Solange challenges us. Paired with the cover of the album which effortlessly blends dualities, falling and rising can be seen as part of the same process, that of the self-love and resolve required to be an affirming Black woman in a place which disregards life so easily. “Falling into your ways” tends to imply negativity: we fall into our ways as we go back to old lovers, pick smoking back up, or miss deadlines. Solange suggests that we also fall into our ways as we come to love ourselves and understand ourselves to be good and eclipsing ideologies of “worth” (Few & Bell-Scott, 2002; Few, Stephens, & Rouse-Arnett, 2003; hooks, 2000). Defying narratives of linear self-growth, Solange’s acknowledgment of the dialectic nature of love for self radiates a wisdom that guides individuals and movements through the many pitfalls and triumphs that will inevitably come.
Opposition and contradiction are forces that find home within and on the bodies of the marginalized. Though fabled as absurd, impossibility and contradiction exist without immediate resolution. The impossibility of contradiction is realized within the experience of Black women, for instance. Occupying the space of absolute sexualization and societal rejection, ascribed life and boundless death, cultural icon and absolute other, contradiction is not impossibility, but rather, the endless dance of contention. Solange litters her album with contradiction and impossibility from the very image of her album cover to the many songs within it. This first song on the album sets forth the liminal zone from which the album emanates, pulling us into and out of what is possible.
In an interview with The Fader, Solange revealed that the album, a loosely packaged personal memoir, was recorded over the course of 4 years. During this period of Solange’s creative musings, people of color, indigenous people, queer folks, and non-Christians in the United States, or folks who are a combination of these identities, were witnessing, mourning, and experiencing first-hand, white rage. White rage is what the United States of America is founded on; it is a byproduct of whiteness. Drawing from the work of Critical White Studies (CWS), Matias and colleagues (2014) argue that whiteness functions as a normative script of white supremacy that maintains racist systems and does not acknowledge how whiteness is “historically, economically, and legally produced” (3). Increasingly, the world watches as unarmed, poor, trans, mentally ill, people of color, children—the most vulnerable in our society—are murdered by the resolute power of whiteness. According to Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Radical Divide (2016), “The trigger of white rage, inevitably is Black advancement. It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship” (2). During Solange’s album production, the carnage of Black life was witnessed in an endless cycle of 15-second loops via social media.
On February 26, 2012, white rage murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Trayvon’s killer would be acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter due to a judicial system that is a functioning artifact of whiteness. Trayvon’s death and his murderer’s acquittal were the impetus of the Black Lives Matter Movement; the movement grew, and continues to grow, in strength, numbers, and visibility.2 The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (2013) reported on the state-sanctioned violence endured by Black people: Every 28 hours a Black person is killed by the police or a vigilante. A Seat at the Table is a dialectic ode to the movement as it wrestles with the daily struggles of “Blackness with ambition” in a world of white rage.
In the same Fader interview, Solange stated that her life and work have been deeply impacted by the writings of Claudia Rankine. During the making of the album, a close friend of Solange’s suggested she read Rankine’s book, Citizen: An American Lyric. When discussing how Rankine’s work influenced her intense feelings about the power of language to express her interior thoughts, Solange says,
Claudia was someone who directly inspired my writing because her poetry cuts through in a really unique way. She leaves certain things up for your interpretation, while also being very direct. I identified with that so much. That has always been something, in terms of my songwriting, that I’ve strived for. I want people to have a personalized experience, but I want my role to be clear within that. Citizen just so powerfully expressed many things I’d been feeling that I just thought, Oh wow, okay. I can actually name these incidents in a very personal way. And I think that, in the past, I might have been a bit more reluctant in my songwriting to be so clear in the narrative—I use a lot of analogies, and I try to have a certain sense of poetry in my writing—but I feel like she really helped inspire me to be more direct in my feelings.
Although in some ways, indeed, direct, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric makes attempts at an analytical deciphering of it purposefully evasive. The book is all poetry, part anecdote, artwork, and narrative. It artistically explores the experiences of being a racialized other in America, viewing and being viewed as object. Citizen does not employ one methodology, seemingly because it evades such stringent calculation. Solange similarly intersperses her album not only with the melodic but with the spoken recordings of those around her. Both Solange and Rankine allow for multiple subjectivities—Solange through featuring speakers such as her mother, father, and Master P, and Rankine through role playing the subjectivities of those other than herself. Rankine’s writing is a dive into the privileging of affect theory as a method of expression. The objectification and annihilation of being Black is the impulse to use the methodology of affect theory, as Rankine acknowledges the incoherency of fluidly telling this story. Similarly, Solange’s album speaks not just through straightforward lyrics, which we could spend multitudinous pages ruminating on. It is the feelings that Solange is sometimes able to name, and at other times only able to make space for, which are the album’s true catharsis and invocation.
Citizen is comprised of seven chapters filled with the life experiences of society’s invisible and most vulnerable. Rankine meticulously illuminates the microaggressions that people of color endure daily which accumulate into a slow death when living against a “sharp white background” (53). As Rankine writes, existence for people of color consists of “anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or Black person lives simply because of skin color” (24). While focusing on the ways in which racial injustice “murders people of colors’ spirits” (Love, 2013, 2016) like a recurring nightmare, Citizen cogitates the state sanctioned violence toward Black people. Rankine’s intersectional meditation on race stretches from an examination of Serena Williams and how her Black excellence is constantly under siege by white rage, to the way white rage explodes into fits of murder upon bodies such as Trayvon Martin’s (36). Rankine’s words at times capture the anger and emotions of Black suffering, as people of color witness, mourn, and internalize Black death. When she is unable to capture the absolute contradiction—the absolute illogic of anti-Blackness—Rankine leaves blank space on her pages, art in the margins, and a wealth of dashes, leaving space for the unspeakable. As Rankine so hauntingly summarizes, “because white men can’t police their imagination Black men are dying” (135).
Rankine’s book and Solange’s album are assemblages. The book and album recognize themselves as the incoherency that is experienced by being Black in a world that relies on the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of Blackness. Such an impossible situatedness—of Blackness as made into object by whiteness and therefore acted upon violently, and Blackness as subjectivated even in the presence of humiliation and disappearance into its own autonomous presence—can seemingly only give rise to an assemblage of response. This form of knowledge production is an education specific to the marginalized. It is education that moves in a nonlinear fashion, rejecting straightforward narratives that could never capture difference and multiplicity.
This form of knowledge production is a form of Black women social justice education not just because of the identities of those speaking, but because of the very method that is employed. Rankine’s method of exposure is one that is in fact very teleological in that it recognizes the Black body is necessarily without teleology: there can be no sense made of such intensive disregard and brutality. In fact, the words used to describe the treatment of Black people in this world (“brutality,” “disregard”) are words that cannot encompass the scope of terror, such that an articulation of the objectification of being Black and female, to Solange or Rankine, is simply an articulation of the events that unfold as being named Black and female. What denotes the terror is not the anecdote itself, but the haze around its utterance. So that when Rankine tells this tale in the span of one page,
In line at the drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter.
The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.
Oh my god, I didn’t see you.
You must be in a hurry, you offer.
No, no, no, I really didn’t see you. (77)
Or when Solange’s father states,
I was the first, one of the first. My first day, a state trooper caught me, put me in the backseat of the car, and meeting the other Black kids, was six of us. And seeing all of those parents, and also KKK members having signs and throwing cans at us, spitting at us. We lived in the threat of death every day. Every day. So I was just lost in this vacuum between integration and segregation and, and racism. That was my childhood. I was angry for years … angry, very angry.
The words aren’t the full brunt of the blow, but the space between them. The inarticulable creation of each breath, space, and pause. Rankine and Solange utilize not the straightforwardness of emotion that tries to name, but the vaporality of affectation, which appears in the utterances and between them, and refuses naming as a necessity to its incomprehensibility. Black women–led social justice education does not mistake pauses for gaps in knowledge, rather it understands this to be a part of the process of knowledge production (Gay, 2014; Adichie, 2015). Black women–led social justice education recognizes that language will fail to name the inarticulable.
New Orleans is Solange’s muse: the site of her radical imagination. In a Vogue interview, the Houston, Texas, native called the Crescent City “magical.” She spoke of how interesting New Orleans is to her because of the city’s unique Black history that is comprised of performance, pleasure, and resistance. New Orleans is also significant because Solange’s roots can be traced back to Iberia Parish, Louisiana, about 120 miles from New Orleans. New Orleans allows Solange to masterfully position her music on the axes of art, Black folks’ lives, and the joy of being Black. Scholar Mark Anthony Neal (1999) writes in his book, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture, that Black popular music can be described as “power, politics, and pleasures” because it is “largely about communities, communities under siege and in crisis, but also communities engaged in various modes of resistance, critique, institution building, or simply taking time to get their ‘swerve on’ ” (1999, x). A Seat at the Table is a lyrical avalanche of Blackness behind the snare beat of New Orleans’ ethos. In the album, Solange weaves the lives of two of the most influential New Orleanian rappers of all time: Master P and Lil Wayne. The song “Mad,” which features 16 bars from Lil Wayne, is a sonic rendering of James Baldwin’s thesis of Black rage.
Baldwin (1984) writes: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time” (205). Moving Baldwin’s acumen to rhyme, Lil Wayne’s verse highlights the perpetual arduousness of being Black; he raps: “Yeah, but I, got a lot to be mad about. … When I wear this fucking burden on my back like a motherfucking cap and gown … Man, you gotta let it go before it get up in the way. Let it go, let it go.” In this verse, Lil Wayne is grappling with the reality that white supremacy lives on the literal backs of people of color. The unbearable weight of this very personal burden, stifling as it is, can easily crush whoever stands beneath it. Wayne warns of “let(ting) it go” before it does. Although much more easily said than done, the importance of Wayne’s verse recognizes the tension between the personal and the structural, importantly not erasing the significance of either.
Following Lil Wayne, the southern, New Orleansian, gritty, sonic aesthetic of the album is solidified with the voice of New Orleans rap god, Master P. Master P punctuates the album with testimonial interludes of Black ambition and struggle against the ever-present veil of white mediocrity. Throughout the album, Master P’s interludes bring sonic testimony to Black ambition. Before the song “For Us By Us,” in which Solange sings, “All my niggas in the whole wide world/All my niggas in the whole wide world/Made this song to make it all y’all’s turn/For us, this shit is for us.” Master P unequivocally articulates Black ambition coupled with keen entrepreneurship skills in the face of the record industry’s’ legacy of colonizing Black music for profit. Master P states:
They offered me a million dollar deal, and had the check ready. Said I wouldn’t be able to use my name. I was fighting my brother, because “Man, you shoulda took the million dollars!” I said “No, what you think I’m worth? If this white man offer me a million dollars I gotta be worth forty, or fifty … Or ten or something.” To being able to make “Forbes” and come from the Projects. You know, “Top 40 Under 40.” Which they said couldn’t be done. Had twenty records on the top “Billboard” at one time. For an independent company. Black-owned company. You know, going to the white lady’s house where my Grandmother lived at, and say, “Look, you don’t have to work here no more Big Mama! We got more money than the people on St. Charles Street.” And I, I took that anger and said, “I’mma put it into my music.” I tell people all the time, “If you don’t understand my record, you don’t understand me, so this is not for you.”
Here, Master P acknowledges the words of Kwame Ture: “Black visibility is not Black Power.” By refusing a deal that would have propelled him to more notoriety than he had ever experienced, Master P demonstrated the recognition that visibility, when “handed down” by an other that controls unequivocally, does not constitute power, but rather the empty shell of symbolic power. Master P’s refusal, brazen as it was, helped carve out his space of power in the game for years to come.
Six years before Master P released his 4x platinum album, MP Da Last Don, Daymond John, J. Alexander Martin, Keith Perrin, and Carlton Brown, four Black entrepreneurs from New York City, launched the clothing company F.U.B.U. The acronym stood for, “For Us By Us.” The name and company was one of the first Black-owned companies to monetize the exclusion of White folks within Hip Hop culture. In 1998, F.U.B.U sales grossed over $350 million worldwide. The title of the track, “For Us By Us,” signals to people of color, especially those who came of age in the late 1990s at the height of hip hop’s global takeover, that Black art must move beyond just visibility to self-sufficiency, wherein artists of color can have the ability to control their art and voice independent of the music industry’s plantation model. The stories of these men are of capitalist ideas of empowerment: a For Us By Us model that signals to white folks that we can beat them at their own game of selling Black culture. But, when all is said and done, is that liberation? Despite Master P’s achievements, we understand that liberation for people of color must be collective—meaning, until “the most marginalized Black people, including but not limited to those who are women, queer, trans, femmes, gender nonconforming, Muslim, formerly and currently incarcerated, cash poor and working class, disabled, undocumented, and immigrant” (Black Lives Matter, 2016, para. 3) are not limited by opportunity or duress, the idea of liberation is hollow at best. An empowerment based off of the maintenance and validation of capitalism can only ever be empowerment for a few, at the cost of the majority. We have to question whether the idea of For Us By Us really means anything if we are merely switching roles with our oppressors.
Robin D. G. Kelley (2002) reminds us that “virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue struggle for change” (78). The emancipatory nature of the song and its title is seductive, but it is not a blueprint for dismantling power. Perhaps instead, it’s a fight song for the struggle. Solange’s music falls within the long legacy of Black women entertainers using their music as pedagogical spaces to spread the ideas of and advance civil rights. From Bessie Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Mahalia Jackson to Solange, Black women’s music has done the seminal work of building collective identity formations for movement building. For example, on the track, “For Us By Us,” Solange sings, “When you driving in your tinted car/And you’re a criminal just who are you … When a nigga tryna board the plane/And they ask you, “What’s your name again.” She adds “For us, this shit is from us/Get so much from us/Then forget us.” “For Us By Us” is a mixture of emotions. Solange so vividly captures the pain, frustrations, and anger with living inside of white folks’ trivializing and violent imagination. The song is a powerful narrative of resistance to whiteness. Solange captures the collective experience of white supremacy as it pummels the Black body, and in response, she evokes white rage, telling it, “Don’t feel bad if you can’t sing along/Just be glad you got the whole wide world? This us / This shit is from us / Some shit you can’t touch” (Solange, 2016). Solange makes it clear that “some shit” white people cannot take from us. Her stance is pro-Black, affirming, and something that needs to be said. The song “For Us By Us” is about more than money or power, it’s about Black humanity and dignity.
Although littered with songs that articulate the complexity of being a Black woman in America, the most “forward” of songs on A Seat at the Table are arguably “F.U.B.U.” and the clap-worthy titled song, “Don’t Touch My Hair.” These two songs capture a tension in the album: that of being unflinchingly for the perpetuation of Black-only experience, space, and reflection, and that of accepting the dominant narrative of the United States as possibility and opportunity for all. This tension, as previously noted, was apparent in the pairing of the album title and the album photo. It is these songs that most clearly express the rage felt toward whiteness that appropriates and preys upon Black people. In “Don’t Touch My Hair,” Solange explores many of the themes surrounding Black women’s hair. Not only pillage to the exoticism of the refrain, “Can I touch your hair?,” Black women’s hair is arguably subject to more scrutiny than any other bodily feature in modern history. Black women experience the exoticism of non-Blacks touching their hair as though hair doesn’t grow from Black women’s’ heads as it does from everyone else’s’. Black women experience scrutiny for the ways they decide to wear their hair: When worn naturally, it is read as unkempt and disheveled, when worn pressed, or preferred as weave, Black women are thought to be sell-outs, self-hating, or promoting ideals of Eurocentrism.
Black women’s hair is always a political space, hence the importance of Solange’s album cover. “Don’t Touch My Hair” beautifully weaves the clear boundary that Solange is drawing around herself and all other Black women, and the vulnerability that hair, specifically Black women’s hair, occupies. This tension between vulnerability and defiance is a literal line by line dance that Solange plays. The first line of the songs begins with the refrain, “don’t touch my hair.” Throughout the song, hair begins to be substituted with other nouns, “don’t touch my soul,” “my crown,” “my pride.” Hair is not just the protein that accumulates from follicles in the scalp—hair is intimacy, strength, and vulnerability. Hair is not left alone, be it by the grower of the hair or by its observer. Hair is disciplined and subject to scrutiny, but hair can also be celebrated. It is a “crown.” This song demonstrates the complexity of keeping the intruders at bay, while also wrestling with seemingly contradictory forces such as love and hate, territorialism and openness, pride and humiliation, inwardly.
Though songs such as, “F.U.B.U,” “Don’t Touch My Hair,” “Mad,” and others are all more complex than their titles might suggest, it is “Cranes in the Sky” that has left us (Bettina and Sarah) lingering in wonderment and disorientation. To both of us, this song one day represented love life, the next day, mass affect, the next day, self-love. This song, out of all the others, proved the most difficult to pin down. It was in this realization—that the song refused simple naming—that assuredness began to set in. There are names that educators, activists, and laymen speak to point to the terrors that structure modern life: racism, homophobia, capitalism, classism (Adams & Bell, 2016; Anzaldua, 1999; hooks, 1994). However, it is the conglomerate of daily experience that gives these categories any meaning at all. Racism can be taught as a set of institutions, practices, and interrelations that consistently inscribe race as inherent and everlasting and within a spectrumed hierarchy. These categories are helpful in that they steer the personal toward the political—they allow an understanding of aggressions and misfortunes out of the neoliberal realm of personal responsibility to the historical comprehension of genocidal chains of command. However, it is the latently formed consciousness of difference in treatment from our peers, the strenuous labor of our mothers, the violence between or absence of our parents, that gives us an inkling that “something ain’t right.” Solange captures the inner dialogue that we battle with due to outside and inward force. Part love song to self and other, part depressed admittance, and all unresolved tension, “Cranes in the Sky” is poetry and truth, as are many of our existences.
The vulnerability of this song cannot be mistaken. Solange wrote the song 8 years ago in one night. The honesty and intensity of the process is revealed through the song, if not it’s background story. Shot in nine different cities, “Cranes in the Sky” is a literal journey through the self. There is universality and specificity in “Cranes.” Who has not tried to drink “it” away? To sleep “it” away—to sex “it” away? It is the “it” that provides the anchor and the detail: the “it” of Black women everywhere being lower than most lows, but for that, higher than most highs. Solange’s journey is a journey of knowledge of the self, and a raw recognition that many of us find ourselves frightened of. It is her honesty and her vulnerability that truly makes this album educational in the most social justice of ways—it is the honesty to be true to what we do and who we become when we are under mountains of pressure that creates self-worth, that beautiful avenue of freedom fighting.
One aim of this book is to document and acknowledge Black women’s social justice practices that take place outside the academy. A constant site of Black women’s legacies as social justice educators is Black motherhood. A Seat at the Table is a generational sonic ode to how Black mothers teach their children to love being Black. Solange is the daughter of Tina Lawson and the sister to megastar Beyoncé; Solange, herself, is a mother. Throughout the album, Solange reveals the way she teaches her 12-year-old son, Daniel Julez Smith, to understand his Black boy magic and her simultaneous fear of having him taken from her. However, Solange’s mother does the heavy social justice mamma lifting on the album in the interlude “What Tina Taught Me.” She says:
I think part of it is accepting that it’s so much beauty in being Black and that’s the thing that, I guess, I get emotional about because I’ve always known that. I’ve always been proud to be Black. Never wanted to be nothing else. Loved everything about it.
It’s such beauty in Black people, and it really saddens me when we’re not allowed to express that pride in being Black, and that if you do, then it’s considered anti-white. No! You just pro-Black. And that’s okay. The two don’t go together.
Because you celebrate Black culture does not mean that you don’t like white culture or that you putting it down. It’s just taking pride in it, but what’s irritating is when somebody says, you know, “They’re racist!,” “That’s reverse racism!” or, “They have a Black History Month, but we don’t have a White History Month!”
Well, all we’ve ever been taught is white history.
So, why are you mad at that? Why does that make you angry? That is to suppress me and to make me not be proud.
This lesson of Black love is evidently instilled in the way that Tina’s daughters go about their art. In April of 2016, Beyoncé released the visual album Lemonade. Lemonade was laced with African symbolism across the diaspora: References to the Middle Passage and African spirituality were seamlessly and intentionally placed throughout. Solange’s creative approach differs from her sister’s, but still commands these historical and contemporary narratives of Black life. Regardless of their different styles, these women are Tina’s children. Her words in the interlude reflect the righteous rage and indignation for how loving being Black provokes white rage. And for all of the truth and beauty behind Tina’s message, we must ask: Is she right? With all due respect of our elders, Tina’s statement, “Because you celebrate Black culture does not mean that you don’t like white culture or that you putting it down” is problematic. Her statement highlights the ambivalent state that this album occupies. Tina’s statement on white culture reads as an apology for the strength in her words proceeding; to say it plainly, we must not celebrate white culture because white culture upholds and perpetuates white supremacy. Whiteness is an enemy to be defeated, not a compatriot to be heralded.
Political sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) argues that the two-sided or “balanced” approach to racial harmony is structurally unreachable through this mindset. We have to reject white culture in its totality because it is fundamentally anti-Black, violent, and oppressive. Being pro-Black means understanding that there is no counterpart to the stance. White folks who are truly about the work of justice must be pro-Black with the understanding that they are rejecting whiteness, and thus, a colonizer’s mindset. There is often an apology or a hedging interspersed in the words of pro-Black messages; we can’t help but read Tina’s words in this way. Tina’s ambivalence is historically structured; whiteness, when it has not violently crushed what is pro-Black, tends to violently curate it, causing this state of ambivalence between recognizing whiteness as inherently anti-Black and espousing a multicultural fantasy.
Solange’s album gives us what texts such as the one we are producing here, are sometimes unable to offer us: the lyrical and sonic measure for that which escapes the bounds of formally structured sentences and linear rationale. For that reason, we love her, and we take her album as a method of education that reflects the historical creativity of Black women who have found ways to engage in social justice through every conceivable measure possible. For as sure as the legacy of oppression toward Black women and non-cis males is true, is as true as the magical ways that Black women have adapted to abhorrence, to create life in the void.
We look to Solange’s album not just as a manifestation of her doubtless talent as an artist, but as a snapshot of a moment in history that has the world listening to the ever-increasing veracity of the phrase, “Black Lives Matter.” Just as we look to Solange as an educator of sorts, so must Solange—and by way, us—look to the historical moment of mass mobilization as her educator. Social justice educators have taken note of the ways in which mass movement sparks a budding intellectualism and new forms of relation. And in the continuance of that legacy and this dialectic conversation that occurs in Tweets, in the annexes of Spotify, on the streets, at our dinner tables, and in our bedrooms, we understand the way in which Black women–led social justice education is a hopeful offering of a new way to learn and grow: a way that gives space for historical weight, a way that recognizes linearity as simplistic. As Black women continue to teach us, and as we speak to one another over the deafening alienation which seeks to partition our existences, we learn that nothing short of the pursuit for total liberation is our greatest teacher.
1.For an extensive understanding of Black Lives Matter see https://policy.m4bl.org/platform
2.It is important to note that BLM is a movement created by three queer Black women: Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza.
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