SOLANGE’S BOLD
PRO - BLACK MASTERPIECE
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An Emotionally Illuminating Evening with Sampha
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Solange's 'A Seat At The Table' Is a Bold, Pro-Black Masterpiece
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POETRY CULTURE
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FEATURE
The Madama Butterfy Efect
SOLANGE'S 'A SEAT AT THE TABLE' IS A BOLD, PRO - BLACK MASTERPIECE
By Shonitria Anthony
Solange Knowles’s first album in eight years deliberately confronts harsh truths about what it is to be black in America— and we’re all better off for it.
Solange Knowles released her fourth album Friday. It’s a beautiful statement about what it means to be black, while also acknowledging how the world makes it hard to celebrate life in a black body. The 21 tracks on “A Seat At The Table” take listeners on a journey, navigating the world as a black person. The album takes dark turns with songs like “Mad” and has very few upbeat moments with the exception of “Junie.” But perhaps, the most stand-out track is “F.U.B.U.” with its exclusionary lyrics that proclaims “this shit is for us.” And, once and for all, in “Don’t Touch My Hair” she breaks down why it’s not OK to touch a black person’s hair. Knowles wants you to know that her pro-black message is “surely not new.”
In a conversation between Knowles, her mother Tina Lawson, and writer Judnick Mayard for an interview published Friday on her Saint Heron site, Knowles said the album was something she felt destined to write thanks to her “very pro-black” upbringing by both her mom and dad, Matthew Knowles (heard in tracks: “Interlude: Dad Was Mad” and “Interlude: Tina Taught Me”).
“Growing up with you and dad nurtured me to speak out and be outraged with inequality for not just black people, but inequality surrounding all types of issues. I’ve always been very passionate about that,” Knowles said when asked by her mother whether the violence and killings of black men and women by the police served as inspiration for the album.
“When I felt afraid or when I felt like this record
would be so different from my last, I would see or hear another story of a young black person in America having their life taken away from them, having their freedom taken away. That would fuel me to go back and revisit and sometimes rewrite some of these songs to go a little further and not be afraid to have the conversation,” she added.
The album nails the truth about the microagressions black people often face on a daily basis.
While the conversation around “A Seat At The Table” has been about the timeliness of its message given the racial climate in the U.S., the subjects of these songs go beyond police brutality, tackling the black experience from many angles. Knowles addresses the difficulty of having to work in, have fun at or live in predominantly white spaces and reminds album listeners that black folks have to internalize these experiences in order to not be discounted as “angry.”
“I ran into this girl, I said, ‘I’m tired of explaining.’ Man, this shit is draining. But I’m not really allowed to be mad,” she sings in “Mad.” The album, unapolegtically bares the truth about the microagressions black people often face on a daily basis. “Physically touching the hair is extremely problematic!” she said in the
To be an Asian woman means to deal with the full scope of personas and fantasies imposed upon you.
BEHIND THE SEX FANTASY
THE MADAMA BUTTERFLY EFFECT
MADAMA BUTTERFLY EFFECT
By Allison Hwen
Illustration by Florence Yee
Ihave never been more Asian than I am when here at Yale. Or maybe I should say, the fact that I’m Asian has never been so remarked-upon as it has been here — particularly in the context of my sex life.But this story doesn’t really begin with me. “There’s a long history of exoticism: of seeing Asian women as eroticized, seeing them as passive and compliant.”
That’s the view of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor Inderpal Grewal, who explained her own understanding of historically-entrenched discrimination to me over the phone last week. I was sitting cross-legged on a mattress on the floor of my attic apartment as she spoke to me over the phone about depictions of Asian sexuality in our pop culture. We were almost too casual. Alarmingly casual. And though warm, her tone was frank as she continued: we both understand quite well the ongoing effects of this myth.“Those histories are important because they
are a way of understanding images that become very sedimented in our societies, in our ways of thinking,” Grewal said.
Grewal is on to something the rest of Yale isn’t. For the past few years, campus has been astir with largely student-driven efforts to improve attitudes around sex. This quasi-movement has included workshops on consent and events like Sex Week, incorporating discourse on topics from body image to BDSM 101. These events are widespread and fairly widely attended: Yale talks about sex.Yet there is one aspect of sex that is rarely, if ever brought up in public, campus-wide dialogue — race. Socially constructed racial stereotypes play a huge role in sexual dynamics in ways that affect everyone, perceived or not. And though we can’t really separate race from discussing sex and sexual attraction, we can certainly examine the language we use. Take a seemingly innocuous screw date request. Some months ago I was helping
