“SLAY, TRICK, OR YOU GET ELIMINATED”: ON “FORMATION” AND PERSONHOOD
This post was originally posted on James Ramsey's Blog: https://dustandthorns.wordpress.com
[This should go without saying, but please read all the way through before you — positively or negatively — judge this piece.]
I.
I was very conflicted about writing this, even more so about publishing it. I thought about the stakes, the potential backlash, my mother, my girlfriend. I thought about whether this would hurt people — Black women — already getting cut down every day. I thought about whether my male, cis-het voice would take up too much space or invalidate the experiences of a people I claim to ride for. I thought about whether I should see this glass as half full.
But the problem isn’t that the glass is half empty. It’s that the other half is poison.
I heard that Beyoncé released a new song called “Formation” with a powerful music video accompanying it. People said it was about Black Lives Matter and that they were empowered by it and that she killed it, per usual. I was skeptical, I’ll admit. I’ve always felt some type of way about pop music, and I’ve always turned a critical eye toward celebrities giving what looked to me like mixed messages, particularly when they take contentious positions in matters of public discourse. Beyoncé wasn’t immune to this sensitivity of mine. Is she independent, working the system, or is she a pawn of the music industry and the embodiment of America’s desires writ large? Is she unapologetically Black, or, like many others, profitably consenting to justenough whitewashing apart from her natural (or at least earlier) skin tone? Does she determine the mainstream, or is she, like so many others, swept in its current, albeit in an advantageous position? These are questions that I’ve wrestled with and that have frustrated me, but I made an honest attempt to suspend them watching this video and her halftime performance during the Super Bowl.
I couldn’t do it.
I was elated by the sheer Blackness of it all. The dancing, the references to phenotypical Black features cast down in our society, the placement of the video in New Orleans with all its rich and troubled history, the police surrendering to the majesty of a dancing Black boy, the natural hair of the background dancers, the melanin, the pride. We needed this. Black women needed this. It’s good for these things to be praised, especially in our particular cultural moment.
Then the questions came roaring back to the surface. I have much discomfort with critiques about the way Beyoncé or any other Black person chooses to exercise their agency in performing their Blackness. But all of the imagery, juxtaposed with Beyoncé’s own person and career, was provocative. What does it mean for Beyoncé to praise Black features in her daughter while blurring her own? What does it mean that these whitewashed features are leading visibly Blacker bodies? How can we understand the imagery of Beyoncé victoriously positioned atop a police car as both a Black woman targeted by state violence and a Black woman who is enthroned atop the corrupt socioeconomic pyramid of our society maintained by state violence?
I watched it again, and with each passing moment, the dissonance I was sensing between and within the lyrics and the music video intensified. She brags about her Givenchy dress, she features poor Black women. She says she likes afros, she opts into a blonde, 2A curl patterned weave. They never take the country out of her, but they obviously paid her enough to dampen it. She gets what’s “hers”, whatever that means, but she features people — Black people — who are routinely robbed of what’s actuallytheirs, that is, their property, their homes, their culture, and their lives, at the hands of the state and of this capitalistic system of things. Beyoncé speaks historically and prophetically when she says, “Slay trick, or you get eliminated.”
And therein lies the rub. In the video’s powerful moment of uplift, it contributed to the pulling down of too many.
The video did a service to Black people with some of these images, and it did a disservice to Black people by advocating systems that have all but destroyed us completely. How can Beyoncé dare feature Martin Luther King, Jr. in her music video, the Black Panthers in her Super Bowl performance, and in the same breath proclaim, “The best revenge is your paper”? How quickly we forget that King, Newton, and so many others we honor and aspire to be like were ardent anti-capitalists. How quickly we forget that race and class are inextricably linked. How quickly we forget that our modern conception of race itself, let alone racism and colonialism, were and still are fundamentally capitalistic projects.
This isn’t just some metaphysical, over-intellectualized analysis of the problematic implications of the music video. People — our people — are actually, physically and spiritually dying because of these thought patterns all over the world. I mourn for the Black people who feel less-than because they can’t afford the newest Jordans, the latest Louboutins, or fresh food to eat. Communities like some of the ones she featured in New Orleans are starving and being ransacked because of similar racist, gentrifying ideals of capitalism. Communities are self-destructing because of the rat race for the same dollar Beyoncé heralds as the key to freedom. We are killing ourselves with notions of revenge, and how much more deadly is vengeance when tied to the same violent system that has and continues to rape the global south and the disenfranchised within our own borders? And how do we reconcile the hyper-sexualization of our bodies, which is largely for the profit and pleasure of the white gaze of the masses, with our so-called champion boasting, “If he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper… Drop him off at the mall, let him buy some J’s, let him shop up”? Don’t the entertainment industry, the sports industry, the financial sector, and America as a whole say a similar thing about exploiting our bodies, our humanity, and our resources, if not in words, then in actions and policies? Haven’t they always?
Beyoncé did a good thing in the music video’s empowering images in this particular moment. Even still, she was not merely unhelpful in the other aspects of it; she colluded in what has been killing us for the past 600 years and bastardized the legacy of our Black activist forebears in the process, certain said activists’ support of her video and Super Bowl performance notwithstanding. She, like this system, empowered herself and others through the dehumanization of the Black underclass and, by association, everyone else, herself included. She cried, “Amen!” to the forces of darkness that whisper to us in the night that we are, at most, as valuable as what we produce and what we have and that we should tailor our images for the consumption of others. Your best revenge is your paper. If you don’t have it, you didn’t work as hard as I have to get it. Your best revenge is your paper. Your other means of elevating yourself over your haters and white supremacy are inferior. Your best revenge is your paper. Good luck slaying like I do without it. Your best revenge is your paper. Get what’s yours, even if it’s someone else’s. Then twirl on them with your albino alligators and your Roc necklace. If you don’t slay like I do, then you get eliminated.
We’ve heard this song before.
II.
I’m deeply troubled by some of the comments and tirades I hear about Beyoncé, as if she alone, out of the whole pantheon of our celebrities, is perpetuating this twisted system of things or, alternatively, that she’s somehow the greatest enemy of respectable womanhood, Blackness, Americanness, or whatever else. This is an absurd notion rooted in anti-Blackness and misogyny that must be condemned. Beyoncé is but one cog in the intricate, violent, massive machinery of the heteropatriarchal, racist, capitalist complex that compromises most of America’s people and institutions, especially our music and entertainment industries. It’s as old as the division between the West and the rest of the world, and the buck doesn’t stop with her. Through similar capitalistic and imperialistic appeals, practices, and policies, other people like Jay-Z, Kanye, Cosby, Mayweather, Kevin Hart, Obama, and many other Black celebrities, let alone non-Black celebrities, have also individually and collectively contributed, perhaps more so than Beyoncé, to the maintenance of the status quo that demands Black subservience while claiming Black excellence as its own. Our favorite public figures, while they can do great things for us and Black people abroad, can also strengthen, intentionally or unintentionally, the chains we’re in.
But even they aren’t acting alone.
On some level, we’re all complicit in this. We uncritically praise them for their success and their representation of us and the alleged victory over forces that bind us because we think the same way. Aren’t most of us guilty of laughing at Martin’s jokes? Didn’t l laugh every time when someone shouted, “You ain’t GOT no job, Tommy!” Why did we do that? Sure, we genuinely enjoy the inevitable shade that comes when someone gets called out for flexing or exposed for lying. But I think there’s more. Underneath the surface, I think this joke is a part of the same cultural, systemic fabric that makes our parents raise their eyebrows at people working for non-profits, that promotes our fabled American Dream, that imputes shame to the penniless and honor to the people who keep the pennies out of their hands, that points the damning finger at welfare recipients for the shortcomings of the country, that twists politics of respectability from strategy to requirement, that puts a dollar value on bodies Black and otherwise, that combines this dollar amount with a private prison industry, that combines this industry with a weaponized, murderous police force expanded early on, lest we forget, to return escaped Black bodies to their masters because they were capital lost.
We need a better way of thinking about this. We can’t accept half-baked notions of uplift that are founded upon the oppression of others, and we must hold fast to King’s declaration that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We must know that our value is not merely greater than cash; it’s ontologically different from it. We were never meant to be monetized, and we must reject the Western lie that our worth is dependent upon anything other than our existence. If we’re going to accept them championing our causes, we have to hold our so-called leaders and spokespeople to higher standards that reflect a more wholistic view of the oppression we fight. There is a common argument that people like Beyoncé are only artists, that the responsibility of activism shouldn’t be placed on their shoulders, that we should be grateful if they say anything at all. I reject this argument’s assumption that the only two options surrounding public discourse about race and justice are silence and publicity. There can be real damage done by discourse that is either directly harmful itself or that contributes to harmful thought patterns and systems. Black people in the public and Internet spheres, generally speaking, have no problem clapping back against problematic things. Why, then, is it controversial for us to simultaneously praise the good and criticize the bad in the actions of people like Beyoncé and, by association, ourselves? And if she enters activist space, why should she be exempt from activist critique? Why should we? And why do we hesitate to rest in the tension of loving ourselves and, from that love, telling ourselves when we are wrong? What is love if not a paradoxical combination of acceptance and a push for wholeness?
III.
Beyoncé does good work. She has spent her career, among other things, invigorating and inspiring Black people with her music, her dancing, and her aesthetics. She has proven herself to be a generous philanthropist to various causes of our people, including Black Lives Matter and, most recently, the Flint water crisis in Michigan. She has been a friend to feminist and womanist alike, and she has been a source of pride for multiple generations of Black people. We should honor this. But what we should not honor, at least not without careful and thoughtful consideration, is her unapologetic collaboration with oppressive systems. Black excellence is more than money, clapbacks, degrees from private institutions, and external markers of some arbitrary set of beauty standards. We are excellent in existing and thriving, whatever thriving may look like. We are excellent because we, too, are made in the image of the living God, no matter our bank balances. I’m not interested in vilifying the wealthy or condemning money as evil. Our love of money, though, has truly been the root of all kinds of evil, including the subjugation of our own people, and this perverted love affair only serves to disfigure our God-created images.
Most Black women I know feel empowered by “Formation”, and that is valid, and it should be taken seriously. It matters more than even I can understand; my empathy is limited as a Black, cisgender, heterosexual man who doesn’t even like most pop music. But I submit to you that in this fight, we have no other choice than to expand our notions of what true empowerment and disempowerment looks like for all Black people.
As the old hymn says, peace, shalom, is to flow like a river. More than a passive absence of a conflict, shalom is to be a positive, righteous, just, corrective, active, self-sustaining presence for the good of our people and of all people. Rivers are flowing and dynamic. Indeed, they’re sometimes quiet and tranquil. But sometimes, rivers destroy things. May we meditate on what needs to be moved out of the way for us to flourish.
