Solange, who is known for being outspoken about injustices, did not shy away about an experience she endured at an event this past weekend. While attending a Kraftwerk concert in New Orleans, Louisiana Solange Knowles along with her husband, 11-year-old son and his friend encountered racial mistreatment. According to BBC.com, in attendance to the event, she estimated it to be 1,500 white concert-goers with only 20 of them being black (including her family and herself). Using her platform, Knowles began live tweeting about her experience at the venue. According to her tweets, she was dancing to one of her favorite Kraftwerk songs when 4 older white women yell to her from behind: “you need to sit down now…” When she still refused to sit down, Knowles wrote that the incident resulted in the women pelting her with trash and a lime wedge.
After tweeting her experience, she received criticism and was blamed for what took place. Victim blaming in situations such as this puts a hand over the mouths of those who already have their hands tied behind their backs. "I'm just going to share my experience ... So that maybe someone will understand, why many of us don't feel safe ... in many white spaces," she tweeted. Solange later deleted all of her tweets about her time at the concert and instead published an essay on Sunday titled ‘And Do You Belong? I Do’ on her website Saint Heron. Where she explained why the incident was not isolated, and why her response should not be treated as celebrity gossip. She stated that she didn't feel as though the people she encountered "do not like black people", but instead were a "product of their white supremacy and are exercising it on you without caution, care, or thought". It all comes down to the tone of things and how things are said. She explains this in her article: "Many times the tone just simply says, 'I do not feel you belong here.' By writing her own essay about the incident, Knowles chose to focus on how she hoped to take control of the conversation, avoiding the focus of what SHE could have done to deserve the treatment she received which is not the issue at hand.
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