After suffering the indignity of having a lime thrown at her because she was dancing at a Kraftwerk concert with her family, Solange Knowles also faced backlash because of her tweets about the incident. Acknowledging that she, her husband, young son, and her son’s friend were four of a small minority of African-American faces in the audience in New Orleans last Friday, Knowles tweeted, “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. We don’t ‘bring the drama.’ Fix yourself.” The internet, being full of atrocious trolls, took this as an opportunity to claim Solange was just “playing the race card” and to pretend like it was somehow her fault for choosing to live in a southern city, because obviously people aren’t racist anywhere but the South.
Knowles explained the situation more in-depth with an essay on Saint Heron, where she placed her story into a bigger narrative. She went into the more minute details of the incident, including tone and language used by the older white women who threw the lime, and her family’s preconceived expectations that they’d be able to, you know, actually dance, at an electronic dance band’s concert even if it was just for “the four songs that you really connect with and plan on getting down to.” She writes about her motive to share the experience on social media, using the second-person to describe herself, “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 without 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.” She goes on to explain the ways the media misrepresented her story, because she never in her tweets wrote that the women who harassed her were racist, only that the experience exemplified the mistreatment and lack of respect people of color face regularly at such events. She wrote, again in the second-person, “You constantly see the media having a hard time contextualizing black women and men as victims every day, even when it means losing their own lives.” Knowles was especially upset that her son, who is 11 years old, had to witness such gross behavior.
