Solange and what it means to have a seat at the table

The co-existence of Black Americans and white Americans has been one of modern society’s most curious and contradictory conundrums of the past five centuries. The incorporation of Black people into white American society after the fall of formal slavery in 1865 has come with roadblocks, barricade brakes, and shady backdoor padlocks. From Plessy vs. Ferguson to Brown vs. Board of Education; from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act, Black people have received their due, all but completely via provocation.

Black people requested the same representation and protection from the government that those same white Americans literally went to war over to gain, only to become the same type of victimizers that the British government had been to them. Music provided the kind of mental freedom to Black Americans, both during and post-enslavement, when they were denied the land to cultivate and a seat at the table of the nation.

By September 2016, singer/songwriter Solange Knowles was poised to release an album that would join the annals of Black music history. Before that, she had emerged from the overwhelming shadow of her superstar older sister, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. She abandoned attempts to assimilate into the charts with typical Black producers and 2000s sonic tropes. She carved her trail with projects that challenged those tropes by first paying homage to the past (2008’s “Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams”) and then looking to the future (2012’s “True” EP).

For Solange’s next project, she did what many Black legends did before her: fused the past and future. The result was “A Seat at the Table,” an album that was both a relevant and prophetic manifesto of affirmation for her people. However, instead of singing about her white oppressors, she decided to sing to them. The album had the audacity of Nina Simone and Tupac Shakur, who had no qualms about addressing white supremacists with no fear and full of righteous rage.

The album begins with the words “Fall in your ways so you can crumble/Fall in your ways so you can sleep at night/Fall in your ways so you can wake up and rise.” Writer Nelson George said in his memoir, “City Kid,” that “Failure is a path to clarity.” “Rise” is a prayer of embracing failure. Stepping out on your own can be scary because you fail; you’re alone. There’s more pressure when you are by yourself, but you learn valuable wisdom when those moments happen.

Solange’s “A Seat at the Table” told a binary story. On one hand, the album gave agency to Black people to embrace their existential feelings of living as Black Americans. She sang, over soulful production from herself, along with the likes of Raphael Saadiq, Q-Tip, and Sampha, about the importance of allowing yourself to feel pain and confusion while repelling forces that tried to take advantage of or diminish their Black pride. The thematic subtext, underscored by interludes from her parents and No Limit Records founder Master P, speaks to Black entrepreneurship and fending off outsiders who want to leach off the culture for profit.

Songs like “Cranes in the Sky,” “Mad,” and “Borderline (An Ode to Self Care)” found Solange purging her own journey of doubt, loss, and disillusionment, giving the listener the agency to lean into their sadness and confusion; don’t avoid those emotions, but accept them, and use them as fuel to fight against the real enemies. On the other side of the coin, she spoke directly to those who wish to keep us shackled, telling them to back TF off. “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “F.U.B.U.” called out white folks, who wished to commodify the culture, saying that it was no use. No matter how much wealth and power they accumulated, they would never be able to create Black culture and revel in the shared fellowship that Black society receives.

Now, 10 years in the future, the notion of what it means to have a seat at the table isn’t what it did in the past. The surrounding landmark albums of 2016 not only deviated from the sonic convention of the time, but were symbols of independence; of being untethered from conglomerate thinking.

Frank Ocean’s “Blonde” shocked critics and fans, expecting the organic funk and quirky hip-hop of his 2012 major label debut, “channelORANGE,” or his 2011 mixtape, “Nostalgia, Ultra.” The album was ethereal and revealing. Ocean’s finessing of Def Jam by fulfilling his contract with a visual ambient album, “Endless,” and then releasing “Blonde” the next day exclusively on Apple Music, with an eight-figure payout and 70 percent royalty rate, was a business coup.

Rihanna released “Anti,” whose title alone invited a suspension of past expectations. It stands as her most progressive, experimental output. After it achieved high-charting singles and universal critical acclaim, she put music on the back burner to launch and run her own Savage Fenty company, elevating her to billionaire status.

Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, completely obliterated the preconceptions of what people expected of him musically with “Awaken, My Love,” like “Blonde” and “Anti.” Tackling his own cerebral and cynical brand of rapping on projects like “Camp” and “Because the Internet,” “Awaken, My Love” was a tribute to the foundational funk of George Clinton and Sly Stone. Befpre the album’s release, he created and released “Atlanta,” a surrealistic comedy series on FX like nothing anyone had seen before from a Black show. As the star, executive producer, writer, and one of its directors, he wanted a show of his own image and imagination after his stint on the NBC sitcom “Community.”

“I just don’t wanna have a job anymore. I don’t want to have a boss,” Glover told Vibe Magazine in 2013, after leaving the show after five seasons. “‘Community,’ I think, is one of the best shows on television. But it’s not mine.”

That year, Solange’s big sister, Beyoncé, dropped “Lemonade,” a multidisciplinary presentation that displayed the duality of dealing with marital infidelity and honoring Black heritage. Beyoncé financed the album’s accompanying film herself via her Parkwood Entertainment production company, with her record label, Columbia, distributing it. That meant “A Seat at the Table” came out as Black ownership was happening through artists like Beyoncé, Ocean, Glover, and Rihanna, providing proof of concept. Rather than working for the labels, they are partnering with them, or circumventing them altogether.

Today, the Black man and the Black woman are finally forced into the corner of becoming entrepreneurs. Media companies are laying off Black creatives left and right, and concurrently erasing remnants of Black history from the internet.

Respected reporters and journalists Joy Reid and Don Lemon lost their jobs at MSNBC and CNN, respectively, and have had to create their own platforms online via social media. Roland Martin started his own weekly news show from home after years of working on CNN and TVOne. Former NFL star Ryan Clark co-founded his own media company, “The Pivot,” while working at ESPN; when the network fired him early this year, he was able to make his own NFL show and do “The Pivot” full-time, forming a distribution deal with Netflix.

The courage that Solange displayed on “Don’t Touch My Hair” and the open vulnerability of “Weary” can be seen in every empowered Black creative now working independently. “A Seat at the Table” implied that there had to be a re-evaluation of how Black people cultivate their place in the world — with new business models. More than a century after Black communities like Tulsa’s Greenwood, Seneca Village and San Juan Hill in New York City, or Rosewood in Florida, self-sufficient Black neighborhoods and cities were burned, bombed, or buried when neighboring whites realized the Blacks didn’t need them as much as they thought.

Thankfully, Solange helped remind so many of us that we can fall, feel weary, get mad, and try to drink away those feelings, as long as we do so to purge them from our bodies so we can learn from mistakes and misdeeds, and build ourselves beyond the help of our oppressors. Having a seat at the table means making our own tables.