Moving through the world with that feeling, there are bound to be some surprises and encounters that either reinstill your connectedness to the “real” world or highlight your distance from it. While in Australia, SZA says she and her entourage were subjected to a number of racist encounters. At one point, an airport customs agent looked at her passport and asked if she was from the Bronx because she “looked tough.” She says it was the first time in her adult life she’d found herself subject to such open stereotyping. “Before you open your mouth, before you even say anything. Even if you’re wearing a two-piece silk suit. It doesn’t matter,” she says.

Now she looks back at the moment and laughs, mostly at the ignorance of it all. She cites her mother, “a chocolate woman,” who SZA says “integrated into the first schools in her area,” as the person responsible for her reaction. “I just take after my mom in the sense that she’s always been like, ‘Well, that’s laughable.’”

With SZA, if something isn’t “weird” or “random,” it’s “funny.” It’s funny that back in America her first class boarding ticket is often double- or triple-checked because why would this black girl be in first class? It’s funny that one of her ex-boyfriends has been scheming to get a ticket to one of her shows. It was funny when she lost her hard drive, after Ctrl was released, only to have it turn up in one of Kendrick Lamar’s lock safes when the studio was shut down and the building cleaned out months later.

There’s a lesson in her mother’s laughter: they can’t touch you if you don’t let them. Instead of looking for revenge or some other sense of satisfaction that you’ve won, you can shrug, laugh, and keep it moving. SZA now tries not to sit in those moments in a way that breeds a desire for an “I told you so” moment. I ask her about those times — of being able to look back at trifling ex-boyfriends and haters, having achieved all she has with a sense of victory. “It was easier to be that person before because I was fueled by revenge,” she says. “When you stop being fueled by revenge, your no’s catch up to you in a different way. You have to look for the lesson. And that shit is hard. But it’s very, very gratifying when it’s done.”

