Piers Morgan wrote a piece in the Daily Mail that's raising a few
eyebrows. It certainly managed to raise mine. In it he reports that a few years
ago, he and Bey had tea. And scones. And he liked her, thought her charming and
so on. But now, in the shadow of her new work, he's not liking her nearly as
much. Between Bey's Formation video, her SuperBowl 50 performance and her new
LEMONADE visual album, Piers is feeling....well I don't know what Piers is
feeling frankly and I guess the question I'm asking myself today is: do I care
what Piers is feeling? Gotta tell ya, I'm leaning, no.
A very smart, articulate young man -
and admitted member of the BeyHive - wrote a terrific piece, in which he pointed out that
Bey's latest works are not for White folk. Oh, you can surely buy them and
enjoy them, but he cautioned that it might not go over so well, if folk with an
expectation of White-centered artistic offering, got it in their heads to pan
the work for its blatantly pro-Black themes. Mic drop. And this, from a sixteen
year old boy. Congratulations young Alex Brown, you got what Piers, a veteran
reporter, could not. You should call him up. Give him the Cliff's Notes
version.
Piers began his piece on Bey by
mentioning that five years ago, she was different; she was the high tea type.
She seemed full of hope for a 'post-racial America'. She was his type. She was
comforting, like a hot cuppa on a cold day. Unfortunately these days, she's
more the standing-on-cop-cars-in-a-flooded-ninth-ward-New-Orleans type; she's
the Black-Panther-leather-wearing-obviously-pro-Black-(therefore
anti-police)-type and he's not happy. His hot cuppa's gone cold, the scones are
hard and the compote isn't nearly compote-y enough and now tea time is ruined!
He, in his own words, "preferred the old Beyoncé. The less
inflammatory, agitating one." Yes well, there it is isn't it? He's missing
his old bae, the one with whom he could have a cuppa.
The undercurrent of Morgan's piece is a sense of "How did we
get here?". Morgan doesn't quite get how the Dresden china-using,
scone-eating Beyoncé became a virago. Ah well Piers, let me tell you a
story about disrespect; a story about abuse, obstruction and multiple attempts
at humiliation (of a sitting president no less) and then let me tell you a story
about a boy named Trayvon, a girl name Rekia, a boy named Jordan, and a girl
named Ayanna and....... What Piers? Too
much? Too many stories? Honey, I ain't e'em start yet. There's another 1000
names on the list of the dead. And that's just 2015. You want to know how come?
This list, the slights, the obstruction, the vitriol is how come. Bey is not
deaf. We are not deaf.
The thing is Piers, Bey has all along
had to decide how to parse her negritude to ensure greater appeal and
acceptance, offering up for public consumption only the bits that she felt
would be easily digested. This is called survival.
Stop any random Black stranger on the street in a majority non-Black society
and they can write you an essay on the myriad ways in which, on any given day,
they do what is necessary to survive; from
how they wear their hair, to how they measure their speech, to how they dress.
I guess you just didn't notice any of that huh?
Beyoncé wasn't always Queen B. She had
to start somewhere and she had to make concessions to get to where she is
today. None of this is unusual for any person in the world. What is a
little different, is that for people of color, a great many more of our choices
are seen as political, even when they are anything but. Hair, political;
Afro-centric garments, very political; annoyance/anger, not so much political
as loaded with prejudicial over and undertones. I guess you didn't notice any
of that either.
There are choices that artists of
color must make on a daily basis if they wish to eat with any regularity. You
know nothing of this, naturally. Folk like you would have recoiled in horror -
is this not precisely what you're doing in the Daily Mail piece? - had Bey
started out speaking the truth with any clarity or volume. Sometimes an artist
must put activist passions on the back burner if success is to be attained. Bey
ain't dumb, she's seen how society will do you if you get too saucy too soon.
(See Piers Morgan's article on this very matter in the Daily Mail for
an example.)
Individuals like you
Piers, haven't quite come to terms with the fact that we can manage to
play the game and yet not lose sight of reality. Shocking I know. Your issue is
that you didn't even know there was a game afoot, one with rules, regulations
and a scoring system of which you know nothing. That's OK! You don't need to know.
It's not your game. You don't belong to the league. But we've tried numerous
times to give you a peep into the inner sanctum of our Supreme Gamer Council,
but you insist that there's no game. This is why you are out of sorts today.
The fact that Bey can handle an
expensive Royal Copenhagen tea service, (was her pinky sticking out tho? This
is what I want to know) and eat scones with the best of 'em, makes her no less
Black; makes her no less affected by the deaths of Black people - young and
old, male and female - in America; no less in tune with the state of Black
America today.
There's a thing that sometimes happens
when we gain fame: we try to use it for the greater good. We don't all do that,
but you should expect that we might. As a group, Black America still has a very
long way to go. As an educated fellow you should anticipate this transition in
Black artists who've achieved some success. Have you not heard of Paul Robeson? Langston Hughes? Cassius Clay -
you might know him better as Muhammad Ali? Harry Belafonte? What about Nina Simone? Ruby Dee? Mahalia Jackson? Surely, you've heard
of these individuals and have some understanding of their histories? Why would
Bey be any different?
As I've heard even Bryant Gumbel
admit, we can't achieve our way out of the price of Blackness. And even if
we're among the outliers who hit the life Lotto, it is in the DNA of our
culture to look back and give a shite about who all are still back there. It is
activism that has brought us this far, and it is activism that will take us all
the way home. We are all too aware that a Black man in a BMW or a Jag is still
too frequently seen as a car thief and may well be treated as such. We are all
too aware that a Black man standing on the street can be mistaken for a
criminal, tackled and cuffed. Ask James Blake how his most recent dealings with the NYPD turned out. And we are all too aware
that a Black woman with a Benz can still be nabbed and put on a psych hold for claiming that the Benz in the
impound lot is hers.
While you, Piers, may well be able to
see each one of these events as a blip on the radar, we - people of color - see
the whole screen and for us, a pattern has long since emerged. It's OK for you
to be 'more comfortable' with the old Bey - or with Old Bay, whatever floats
your boat my brother. As for the rest of us, we see what we have always seen in
our artists: people whose success allows them to speak boldly where before
there could only be vague murmurings.
I'm glad you and Bey had tea, but the
time for tea and sympathy is at an end. It's time for some lemonade my brother.
Drink up!
Don't worry though. The human mind is
capable of great things, adjusting to the reality that Bey is Black (*gasp* I
know!) and that she gives a shite about the diaspora? Yeah, you can get used
that. Or you can find a new bae whose music you can love. Free country. Do what
works for you. Beyoncé sho' is. It'll be alright. I promise.
*Sips tea lemonade*
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