Willow Smith recently spoke about being unafraid of the angry Black woman stereotype and discussed her difficult breakup.
Willow shared her sentiments in her latest interview with SPIN magazine, among other topics.
“If you look at history and you look at what the Black woman has had to endure, what other emotion are we going to have?” she said about being unafraid of the trope that has been looming over Black women for centuries. “We shouldn’t be afraid of that stereotype. We should be like, ‘Okay, yes, and let me tell you why.’ There are 15 million reasons.”
She continued, sharing that she–a young African American woman–isn’t “just angry for nothing” but that she’s “angry because nothing ever happens.”
“I’m not just angry for nothing. I’m not just angry because nothing ever happens,” the 22-year-old insisted. “I’m angry because there are hundreds and hundreds of years of really just unfair abuse and violation and violence. Even our own men turn on us. That also hurts. I think we need to come together and be more compassionate toward one another, Black women as well.”
The rock singer and daughter of legendary award-winning entertainers Jada Pinkett-Smith and Will Smith also shared that she recently endured a painful breakup with a girlfriend. She reportedly unleashed her anger about the separation on her newest album Coping Mechanism.
“I hate being messy, but in order to heal something, you have to let it come up,” she told SPIN.
Willow didn’t go into specifics as to who the now ex-girlfriend is, but she shared that the project was a critical factor in her journey toward healing.
“The purge of who you were before,” she said. “You cocoon, then you come out as a butterfly. That sounds very cliché, but there’s really no other way I could say it. A caterpillar turning into a butterfly is primal… it’s natural…but it’s also magical. It can be both things at once. It can be messy. It can be uncomfortable. It can be scary. But it can also be beautiful, fantastic, and magical. It can be very earthly and also very spiritual, also very cosmic. I like to accept those dualities. With my songwriting, it’s just an expression of who I am. When you’re learning to love who you are, it’s all spiritual.”
In addition to Coping Mechanism, the young woman has been busy co-hosting Red Table Talk alongside her mother and grandmother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris.
