I have been sitting on this blog since January. I was trying to figure out how to get it just right. I was afraid of pissing someone off.
And then I was like screw it, this video made me FEEL and I am going to talk about it! By FEEL I mean I screamed and cried the first time. The second time I was like HOLY CRAPOLA did she just do that? I have since then watched this video at least twice daily.
I wake up singing this song. I have friends who loathe this song. “It is not my favorite” they say. To them I say wake up y’all we got some work to do!
For a white girl from Park City, Utah I am so damn excited that this badass bold beautiful black woman is calling America on our shit. While talking about good sex. And flipping off the Nation. In front of a plantation. Surrounded by beautiful men.
Oh YES, where can I get some more of that please?
Not to mention calling all the ladies into formation. Now I know that symbolically this means something different to me than it does for other people but hear me out. Beyoncé is talking about getting women together against the backdrop of an empty swimming pool (History Lesson America: many people of color don’t know how to swim because of segregation and systemic racism).
The power of that was juxtaposed with that amazing child about my daughters age dancing in front of a SWAT team. When did we become a nation that shoots first and asks questions later?
Women are the power — we are the shifters — we are the community builders and the change agents.
We birth, we nurture, we shift, we SLAY
This video and its words remind us that POWER, CONTROL, VIOLENCE are intertwined and unavoidable.
And this takes me to the response from some law enforcement agencies to this video (Referenced in this blog here). If a small black child dancing in front of a line of adult SWAT team members is a deliberate move to incite violence against police (according to you), then we need to have a big old fireside chat about our priorities as a police state, which is what we are if children dancing in the street causes that kind of a response. Beyoncé is saying something that you don’t want her to.
Is it because she is rich, black, female, and powerful instead of working class, white, male, and powerful?
Now, let’s just discuss her drowning on the police car (which really freaked a whole lotta people out and got them all in a lather). She is NOT threatening you. She is NOT inciting bad behavior (and if she is then BRAVO, we need a damn revolution). What I saw was Beyoncé REMINDING America that we are a nation built on flawed policies, flawed responses to poor people, flawed in our ability to acknowledge our own racism and fear of anyone who is “different”. She is drowning right along with you and me and the rest of us.
If as a Nation a woman like Beyoncé cannot speak the truth from her position in this world then we have come to a deep dark place as a democracy.
The continued silencing and disempowerment of powerful women — especially women of color — allows us to maintain a regime of inequality critical to sustaining the oligarchy as we now experience it.
Our persistent separation of us and them continues the racism and sexism that is so pervasive in our country and which is critical for the maintenance of power in America.
We as white people, as law enforcement, as people of power have a vested interest in shushing women like Beyoncé. And to that I say, enough is enough. This is my call for a #GracefulRevolution where we stop shushing and work to stop the pervasive racism and sexism in this nation.
To that end, I say to you King B — I pray to GOD that you are indeed the Black Bill Gates in the making — may you SLAY this Nation to its knees.
