Solange Knowles Pens Powerful Message After Women Threw Trash At Her

Solange Knowles has penned a powerful essay on race, following an incident that saw two women throw limes at her at a Kraftwerk concert.

The 30-year-old was standing up and dancing with her husband Alan, 11-year-old son Daniel, and his friend Rasheed, when two women sitting behind shouted, “sit down now, you need to sit down right now”.

Solange wrote (referring to herself in the second person) that, “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”.

She also explained that she was only planning on standing for “the four songs that you really connect with and plan on getting down to”.

Not long later, Solange realised that the women had begun to throw limes at her.

She shared this story on Twitter, explaining in her essay:

“You’re full of passion and shock, so you share this story on Twitter, hands shaking, because you actually want these women to face accountability in some kind of way. You know that you cannot speak to them with out it escalating because they have no respect for you or your son, and this will only end badly for you and feel it’s not worth getting the police involved. So, you are hoping they will hear you this way.

You know 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.'”

Solange also explained that she had since deleted the tweets about the incident, for fear of misreporting: “you realize that you never called these women racists, but people will continuously put those words in your mouth.”

“What you did indeed say is, “This is why many black people are uncomfortable being in predominately white spaces,” and you still stand true to that.”

She concluded her essay by listing some examples of “people of colors’ “spaces” [being] attacked every single day”, before saying:

“After you think it all over, you know that the biggest payback you could have ever had (after, go figure, they then decided they wanted to stand up and dance to songs they liked) was dancing right in front of them with my hair swinging from left to right, my beautiful black son and husband, and our dear friend Rasheed jamming the hell out with the rhythm our ancestors blessed upon us saying….

We belong. We belong. We belong.

We built this.”

You can read the whole essay here.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Images via Getty