Coda

“Have a Seat at My Table”

In the introduction to this book, I presented Kerry Washington’s notion of taking a seat at the table as one at the heart of postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity. Washington’s logic seems to go like this: in order to be invited into elite spaces, women of color must politely point out the importance of our inclusion. If we are “lucky enough” to be chosen, we join a very traditional table where we are the only or one of very few who are included. Our inclusion is contingent not only upon the majority’s maintaining our numbers as small but also upon us following a series of strict rules imposed upon minoritized people by the majority. Such rules include participating politely but not taking over (possibly smiling more than talking); following gendered as well as racialized norms (perhaps keeping our feet tucked neatly behind our chairs); and veering away from contentious topics (most definitely keeping the table upright and intact). In essence, if we want to be invited, if we want to remain at the dinner party, and if we want to be asked back, we must stay resolutely and entirely in our place.

Like celebrity actress Kerry Washington, superstars Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Shonda Rhimes have all managed to score invitations to this exclusive table. And yet, while they might have once followed these strict rules, they are now writing their own rules; the women whose images we consume today do not, by any means, appear to be cowed by any invitation they might receive. None of these women fit the description of polite ladies who stay in their place. They are groundbreakers, role models, and powerhouses, whose first experience of being invited to the table eventually turned into them being the ones doling out the invitations. But, to do so, they have also cracked a certain code of strategic ambiguity, which has meant both crossing-over and compromising. The young women in my audience study and the Black women television executives I interviewed wanted to join the table too, and, in the case of the Hollywood women, garnered their own invitations, but they saw the rules of the table differently than the celebrity icons. The women I spoke to saw the table more akin to the table that singer, songwriter, and performer Solange Knowles conjures in her 2016 album A Seat at the Table. Solange helps her listeners envision a new table that facilitates different modes of minoritized engagement.1 In this third studio album, which debuted at number one on the Billboard charts, Solange pushes back on those with limited expectations of her—including music critics admonishing her to not become too radical so as not to alienate her White audiences or, as she recalls one critic put it, “bite the hand that feeds you.”2 She includes interludes from Southern rapper Master P on Black resilience, from her father Matthew Knowles on facing racialized violence when integrating his school, and from her mother Tina Lawson on Black beauty and White anger.

Critic Daphne Brooks calls Solange the bearer of “urgent, necessary, multifaceted, Black feminist sonic activism.” She is, Brooks explains, “an artist who’s galvanizing statements about the nature of Black freedom, Black movement, and Black imagination on the move that have quickly become the soundtrack to our current moment of ongoing resistance and resurgent struggle.”3 By creating #BlackLivesMatter era protest music, Solange urges her listeners to resist, refuse, and reject the traditional seat at the table, if taking that seat means compromising yourself. For example, in the second verse of “Weary,” the second song on the album, Solange holds up a mirror to women performing strategic ambiguity, crooning: “Be leery ‘bout your place in the world/You’re feeling like you’re chasing the world/You’re leaving not a trace in the world/But you’re facing the world.” Strategic ambiguity is that single-minded, individual-focused chase that doesn’t connect with the strength of the collective, the strength of Black communities. The entire album is a love letter to Black people, especially Black women, and it features moments of incredible self-reflexivity and exhortations to incite change while fearlessly stepping up to “face the world.”

Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity has traced an arc from Kerry Washington to Solange Knowles. This book has probed performances that ranged from politely slipping in critiques through a strategic ambiguity of postracial resistance, to shouting analyses through an unapologetic racialized intervention. I have argued that in the Michelle Obama era, a very visible group of African American women celebrities, the audiences that watch them, and the television executives who script their images sometimes used and sometimes abandoned the tools of postracial discourse—the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both Whites and people of color—in order to resist the very tenets of postracial discourse. Postracial Resistance has documented Black women in three different places in media culture: Black women celebrities themselves, Black women and other women of color viewers negotiating their own ways through the limited representations available to them, and Black women writers and others working behind the scenes in television and other media to create media representations. I used a mix of methodologies—textual analysis in part one, and industry analysis and audience ethnography in part two—and a wide array of media studies strategies to paint a full picture of Black women’s performance of strategic ambiguity.

While the performances of the celebrity figures in part one might have looked more coded and cautious, and the articulations of the audiences and television executives might have looked more forthright and bold, both, however, iterated their own brands of resistance. Postracial resistance of the strategic ambiguity variety coyly performed against racism and sexism of a mostly coded, implicit form. Such performance was, in some ways, complicit with the very forces it sought to unpack. Postracial resistance can proffer such a light touch that it fails to sufficiently nudge, much less wipe out, racism. This light touch is partially to blame for the regime shift from our 44th to 45th presidents. Postracial resistance didn’t alert and activate those unused to reading racialized nuance enough to fear the coming of the virulent racism hiding in plain sight. Postracial resistance allowed 45 to sneak up on certain members of the complacent, Obama-loving populace. Indeed, in some ways, Americans, especially of the White liberal variety, were so enamored with the so-called postracial changes ushered in with the Obama era that the reversion to explicit forms of racism, even when Trump’s dog whistle was replaced by his bullhorn, seemed impossible (until it was too late).

What the transition from the Obama to the Trump era appears to demonstrate starkly is not only that postracialism, as a tool of change, is an impossibility, but that strategic ambiguity, as an instrument of individual success, is highly fraught. Thus, a shift in frame and a shift in approach are necessary now more than ever, again, as Solange illustrates in A Seat at the Table. Unpacking the metaphor conjured in her album’s title in an interview on NPR Solange gives her take on the seat: “We’ve always had a seat at the table … I think one of the [things about taking] seats at the table is also saying that, you know, I’m inviting you to have a seat at my table.” In flipping the notion of inclusion, Solange presents the idea that power comes from being the one who sets the terms, the one who does the inviting and not the one being invited. Kerry Washington provides one model for women of color that she (and she alone) will join a table that is already set by someone else. That if we are patient, that if we are good girls, that if we wait our turns, then maybe someday we might get to be the one who holds the invitations in our hands. But, after we wait that long, who have we become? In a different model, Solange invites women of color to not wait. We get to be the ones in charge of the table now. When we invite people to join our table, we get to choose the guests, the topics of conversation, and create our own meal. We are able to center ourselves and the issues affecting our communities. We are not marginalized as the afterthought. We become unapologetically the center. And the soundtrack to the dinner party? Solange Knowles’s anthem to the abandonment of strategic ambiguity, the first track on the album, “Rise”: “Walk in your ways, so you won’t crumble/Walk in your ways, so you can sleep at night/Walk in your ways, so you will wake up and rise.”