Just before the Super Bowl 50 on Sunday, Feb. 7, Texas native Beyonce released a new song called “Formation”. Many people seemed to lose their minds, for very different reasons. Following a halftime performance alongside Coldplay and Bruno Mars–that featured the diva and her dancers channeling the Black Panthers in all black and berets–a number of people took to social media to voice their discontent.
It seems that not everybody was buzzing with the Beyhive on this one. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called it outrageous that Bey would use the show as a “platform to attack police officers, the people who protect her and keep us alive.”
Kelly Rowland, Beyonce’s friend and former group mate, defended her to US Weekly during a red carpet Grammy event, saying, “I think that we live in a country where you have the freedom to say how you feel and talk…I think that they’re blowing it out of proportion.” Although, Rowland later funnily amended that statement about freedom by adding that Giuliani should shut up.
Beyonce’s Formation video plays on images of Hurricane Katrina and other black cultural references. It also features the singer sitting on top of a police car as it sinks underwater and a young boy dancing in front of a line of officers standing with their arms in the air in a “hands up, don’t shoot” reference.
As the singer announced that her Formation World Tour was gearing up, Toronto being one of the stops, Toronto City Counsellor Jim Karygiannis asserted that Beyonce’s ties to the Black Panther Party should be investigated.
In an interview with The Toronto Sun the Canadian official said, “If someone wore bullets and supported (a radical group) here, they would not be welcomed in the United States…She or some of them could be found not eligible to enter the country as others in the past have faced.”
He is referring to the militarized costume that strongly mirrored the jacket that pop king Michael Jackson wore during his Super Bowl performance. For those who don’t know, the Black Panther Party was a political organization founded in Oakland, California in the 1960s that practiced militant self-defense to protect minority communities against the U.S government. One of their symbols was the “black power fist” that Beyonce used during her performance.
The Blaze network pundit Tomi Lahren went off the deep end in a video rant, slamming the singer. “White people buy your songs on iTunes, memorize your lyrics and admire your talent and beauty. Little White girls wanna be like you just as little Black girls do, but instead of that, you’d rather perpetuate the great battle of the races.”
In that video segment she also told Beyonce she needed to mind her husband, hip hop rapper and producer Jay-Z, and worry about him being a drug dealer of 14 years. In response to her attempted character assassination, Jay-Z simply laughed the comment off. Lahren tries to shame the couple for the rappers past, disregarding the strong mogul image he has constructed for himself.
And heaven forbid one of the most iconic black women in the world try to send a message of body positivity towards those little black girls that might not feel like they are not being represented broadly in the media. She doesn’t want her child’s hair permed or straightened, she likes it in its natural state. She likes that her husband has a big nose. She’s a hard working black woman proud of her heritage and attributes her success to her own self-efficacy (not the Illuminati as conspiracy theorist like to think). Those are messages that won’t necessarily speak to broad audiences on a personal level.
Everyone seems so quick to be offended nowadays, especially with race issues, that they are given to misguided generalizations of complex situations. Since when is a mentality that rejects police brutality anti-police in general? Since when is it controversial to ask someone to stop gunning down unarmed and presumably innocent citizens?
In her video rant Lahren had the wiles to say that Beyonce was ripping the historical band-aid off and playing the victim. By ripping the band-off does she mean continuing to keep issues of police brutality relevant? Because that is something that should never be swept under the rug until it is confronted and dealt with in full.
Saturday Night Live aired a sketch during last weeks show that attempted to satirize the overreaction to the singer’s new song. “The Day Beyonce Turned Black” features a world turned apocalyptic when white people realize that Beyonce isn’t just the global icon.
Now that they see that Beyonce has produced something that maybe isn’t just “for them”, as one of the horrified women says, people start to see that even Kerry Washington from ABC’s hit show Scandal is black, too.
It’s great that Beyonce can touch a multitude of audience and demographics but she is also a person with opinions and a black woman first and foremost. A lot of people like to claim that they don’t see color when it comes to their preferences and the people they care about, that’s not necessarily a bad thing but race and ethnicity plays a big part into how people identify and interact with the world. This whole fiasco with Beyonce only proves that.
Zhana Johnson
Senior Features Editor
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