Mathew Knowles: Growing Up My Mom Told Me Not To Bring A Nappy Headed Black Girl Home, I Thought Tina (Lawson) Was White

Mathew Knowles: Growing Up My Mom Told Me Not To Bring A Nappy Headed Black Girl Home

Mathew Knowles is opening up about his experience with racism growing up. The 66-year-old business man is known for managing his megastar daughters Beyonce and Solange Knowles. Prior to launching his famous daughter’s careers, he grew up in the south and struggled with racism. While promoting his new book, Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, he revealed that while growing up, his mother didn’t necessarily embrace being black.

When I was growing up, my mother used to say, “Don’t ever bring no nappy-head Black girl to my house.” In the deep South in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, the shade of your Blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message.

Mathew Knowles, Solange Knowles, Tina Lawson

He also says that he growing up, he mainly dated white women. In fact, he says when he first met his now ex-wife Tina Lawson, he thought that she was white.

I have a chapter in the book that talks about eroticized rage. I talk about going to therapy and sharing – one day I had a breakthrough – that I used to date mainly White women or very high-complexion Black women that looked White. I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was white. Later I found out that she wasn’t, and she was actually very much in-tune with her Blackness.

He continued,

I had been conditioned from childhood. Within eroticized rage, there was actual rage in me as a Black man, and I saw the White female as a way, subconsciously, of getting even or getting back. There are a lot of Black men of my era that are not aware of this thing.

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