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In “Formation,” which invokes both Katrina and the Black Lives Matter movement, Beyoncé attempts to politicize black tragedy and black death by using them as props for popular consumption. That isn’t advocacy. While some people are gagging at the idea of Beyoncé atop a New Orleans Police Department squad car or sitting in a 19th-century living room in plaçage attire, I’m reliving trauma. I’m thinking about how the system failed us. I’m thinking about how the central government and the head of state left us to die. I could speak about the incompetence of some local leaders, the breakdown in communication of authorities, the lawlessness of police officers and troops. I could speak about the vicious racist vigilantes who hunted evacuees down like dogs for trying to secure safe ground for themselves and their families. But I don’t.

While some are made giddy by the metaphor of Beyoncé’s body being subsumed by the water, I am remembering images of bloated bodies of grandmothers and grandfathers, cousins, uncles, great aunts, and nieces that drifted through the floodwaters like discarded pieces of scrap wood. These were all images that ran across my television screen on repeat in the weeks and months after the levees broke. These were the horrifying tales relayed to me by survivors of the storm.

I am also reminded of my grandmother, Gladys Calvin, Ibaye, and her sarcasm, Sunday morning phone calls, and the pancakes that I miss so much. She was one of the tens of thousands whose lives were sacrificed indirectly as a result of medical complications, suicide, heartbreak, post-traumatic stress disorder, or murder that took place in the months and years following the storm. She was a dialysis patient who wasn’t able to receive treatment for weeks, denied by hospital after hospital. The post-Katrina effect did rapidly deteriorate her body, which necessitated the amputation of both of her legs, and in the end took her away from us before we were ready to say goodbye.

For an artist to become political, must she perform against a backdrop of black tragedy?

“What happened at the New Wildins? ... Bitch I’m back, by popular demand.” The words of the late bounce rapper and comedian Messy Mya braggadociously introduce Beyoncé’s anthem. A marginalized queer black man, Messy Mya in all of his wildest imagination, ribbing, and capping would not have believed that the world’s biggest pop star would use his voice in a video—without, however, acknowledging his humanity in life and in death. Messy Mya, a household NOLA name, was shot and killed at age 22. The city has had the highest or one of the highest murder rates in the country since I was a child. In focusing on black New Orleanian lives, it would have been easy for Beyoncé to dedicate “Formation” to Messy Mya and other victims of gun violence. She provided no context for his life or death. Those not in the know could mistake his sassiness with that of the Queen of Bounce, Big Freedia, whose voice is heard a little later in the song. This is not gumbo. These are black lives.

What does it mean to speak for a marginalized community who has not asked for your pronouncements? From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem as if Beyoncé, by returning to the devastation of Katrina, is centering New Orleans, but she is not. She’s rather exacerbating a trauma.

And Beyoncé has been co-opting New Orleans culture for years. Instead of inviting one of the original Kings of Bounce, DJ Jubilee, to perform the dances that he choreographed and created for “Get Me Bodied”—whose syncopated beat and lyrical formations were taken directly from his 1993 local New Orleans classic “Do the Jubilee All”—she presented this genre of music and dance as if it had been created in her own studio or Houston backyard.

But all great artists imitate others. In some spaces, that’s called plagiarism. In others, appropriation. Can black people appropriate one another? I’ve never thought I’d come to this conclusion, but yes, we can—especially when you’re one of the most influential and powerful black women in the world. Especially when you take the cultural productions of a marginalized community and present them as your own. Especially when you capitalize off of their deaths. This is not giving people voice. It is stealing.

I’m not saying that no one can read “Formation” as a black girl Southern anthem. Blackness is not monolithic, and neither is U.S. black American Southernness. But for an artist to become relevant and political, must she perform against a backdrop of black tragedy?

Anyone who has spent significant amounts of time in the Crescent City and other areas of the Global Black South knows that New Orleans is a global city by heritage, history, and might; art historian Robert Farris Thompson has oftentimes referred to it as the uppermost region of the Caribbean. So New Orleans indeed has more in common with Santiago de Cuba, Curaçao, and Port-au-Prince than any other American city save for Charleston, South Carolina. No single artist can assume the uncontested right to speak on New Orleans’ behalf. If all that protest songs and videos require these days is a little twerking, faux-Voodoo images, and nappy hair, this new revolutionary moment that we’ve found ourselves is in bad shape. I don’t have high expectations for a pop superstar, but I do have some for many of the brilliant black activists and scholars who have exalted and defended her in this moment. I’m not so sure that Beyoncé is here for natural-hair women, Black Lives Matter, or New Orleans. However, I’m superclear that she’s here for herself. Her family. Her money. Her power.

Those beautiful nappy-haired Afros worn by the Black Panther–esque backup dancers are props just like the floodwaters, the submerged New Orleanian backdrop, and the police car that keeps Beyoncé afloat throughout most of the video. Those darker-complexioned little girls who stand beside Beyoncé’s child, the voice of a queer and deceased black man, and a Katrina survivor were all vehicles to use for selling out her next world tour.

Layered in and through the landscape of a black New Orleans still rigorous and delightful, past and present, the black southern signifiers and simulacra are unrelenting here. Bodies are quiet, awaiting animation, and then they pulsate, loudly: in parking lots, in drained swimming pools, in streets, atop horses, in front of a police line, in a church, in a second line, in a parlor, in mirrors. Beyoncé places her own reckless, country blackness–one of afros, cornrows, and negro noses, brown liquor and brown girls, hot sauce, and of brown boys and cheddar bay biscuits–in conversation with and as descended from a broader southern blackness that is frequently obscured and unseen in national discourses, save for as (dying, lynched, grotesque, excessive) spectacle. Through this reckless country blackness, she becomes every black southern woman possible for her to reasonably inhabit, moving through time, class, and space. At her limits, the voices and presence of genderqueer folks enter to take over. They, in fact, ask of us the toughest questions. “What happened at the New Wil’ins?” queries Messy Mya from the grave, which Beyoncé encourages us to hear as a question about the comedian’s unsolved murder as well as a question about the city and black folks and the South: “What happened after New Orleans?” They also give us the most audacious commands to slay regardless, even if we are taken. We are thus propelled into the life and death, future-present-past the video conjures.

The articulation of southern blackness here invites us to theorize black resistance practices. There is the expressive resistance that stands and fights and brandishes guns and stages coups. There is the quiet resistance, the meditative kind that Kevin Quashie talks about. For Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man, it is hibernation, the act of a particular kind of invisibility, that is a “covert preparation for a more overt action.”

Formation, is a different kind of resistance practice, one rooted in the epistemology of (and sometimes only visible/detectable to) folks on the margins of blackness. The political scientist Cathy Cohen talks about activism at these margins, the kind of deviance-as-resistance built and cultivated at the margins of respectable blackness. Formation, then, is a metaphor, a black feminist, black queer, and black queer feminist theory of community organizing and resistance. It is a recognition of one another at the blackness margins–woman, queer, genderqueer, trans, poor, disabled, undocumented, immigrant–before an overt action. For the black southern majorettes, across gender formulations, formation is the alignment, the stillness, the readying, the quiet, before the twerk, the turn-up, the (social) movement. To be successful, there must be coordination, the kind that choreographers and movement leaders do, the kind that black women organizers do in neighborhoods and organizations. To slay the violence of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, we must start, Beyoncé argues, with the proper formation. The proper formation is, she contends, made possible by the participation and leadership of a blackness on the margins. The celebration of the margins–black bodies in motion, women’s voices centered, black queer voices centered–is what ultimately vanquishes the state, represented by a NOPD car. Beyoncé as the conjured every-southern-black-woman, slays atop the car and uses the weight of her body to finish it off, sacrificing herself in the process. Like so, so, so many black folks in the margins in the movement for (all) black (lives matter for) liberation. This formation is brought to you by conjure.

D.o.S. wrote:But I'm sure my super white friends from Canada,Wisconsin, and Michigan will be here to whitesplain to me what Beyonce's really going for here.

(kidding, obviously. Probably can't 'sarcasm font' the above hard enough)

But if your liberal white male friends are anything like mine, they have not kept quiet. In Facebook rants, emails, and private conversations, friends and colleagues of mine have critiqued “Formation’s” lyrics as “dumb” and “meaningless,” her video as “vapid.” They’ve pointed to what they see as better examples of protest music; claimed that Bey uses her body, beauty, and image as a crutch for weak material; and lambasted the “Formation” kitsch that appeared on Beyoncé’s website immediately after the song’s release.
1. Read some of the many articles by brilliant women of color

There is no shortage of outstanding commentary on this song: much of it by women of color who know more about the black freedom struggle, black politics, and black art than most of us could accumulate in a dozen lifetimes. If these commentators can find meaning in the song, then I strongly encourage anyone who has dubbed the song meaningless to reconsider their assessment.
[editor's note: that last line is actually so fucking stupid, but that's ok]
2. Rethink what you’re calling “dumb”

If Step 1 hasn’t convinced you, consider this: what some are calling ‘dumb’ (lyrics like “When he fuck me good, I take his ass to Red Lobster”) is merely blunt. And that’s the point! “Formation” is about black pride, country pride, pride in the lives, bodies, culture, and beauty of everyday Americans of color. It’s Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson for the twenty-first century. To celebrate hot sauce and Jackson 5 nostrils in the style of Bob Dylan or Neil Young would defeat the song’s purpose.

4. If you’ve got a problem with materialism, find another target

I’ve heard gripes about Bey’s celebration of Givenchy as well as the song’s concluding couplet: “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.” Generally speaking, I agree with these gripes. I too object to the principle behind what Tiffany Lee calls Beyoncé’s “constant conflation of capitalistic success with feminist liberation.”

But, as Lee also states, this isn’t the point of the song. And ultimately there are far more grievous offenders when it comes to rank materialism than Queen Bey. Are we really going to pick on Beyoncé when Donald Trump and Pharma Bro continue to stalk the earth?

6. Check your Politico-style critique

White people have a terrible, oppressive habit of engaging black activism at the level of strategy rather than substance. Want proof? Read (or re-read) Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and consider how much of the essay is devoted to convincing supposed white allies that their strategic considerations for the Civil Rights movement are basically racist, conservative, and self-defeating.

Continuing this tradition, liberal criticism of “Formation” has focused on what Beyoncé should and could have said: how her song and video could have made a more effective, trenchant or impactful statement. To this I say: Shut it, white folks. The black freedom struggle does not need white people’s strategic input. It needs white people to be better versions of themselves, to stop participating in and perpetuating white supremacy.

Is “Formation” the last word on anti-racist feminism? Of course it is not. Thankfully, Beyoncé is but one of many powerful voices – from Toni Morrison and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Mia McKenzie and Ta-Nahisi Coates. To demand Beyoncé be a “spokesperson” is among the most insidious forms of racism. When we start pillorying Toby Keith or the Insane Clown Posse for misrepresenting white America, please get back to me.

daseb wrote:So why arent coldplay copping shit for being rich activists? Is it because we already know they're terrible? Or because they're so safe and bland that there's no way they'd ever be as controversial as to say 'pigs shoot people sometimes'?

Invisible Man wrote: But yeah, I get all that, I hear all that. That's the conversation, right? Not gonna be cowed by the (admittedly) quality logic of the first article. But that's why I keep saying pop/propaganda...if you can't exploit powerful images to make your point--even if the point is to make money--you're only left with abstraction, which is not something that everyone's gonna associate with actual politics. So what's a person to do? Yeah, she 'appropriates images,' but...she's gonna reach a ton of people here, and perhaps make incremental changes. More than she would if she rolled up her sleeves, anyway, and got down to it herself. Clearly, she's a cheerleader. Is that a bad thing, even if all the parts of this are kinda problematic?

D.o.S. wrote:But I'm sure my super white friends from Canada,Wisconsin, and Michigan will be here to whitesplain to me what Beyonce's really going for here.

(kidding, obviously. Probably can't 'sarcasm font' the above hard enough)

D.o.S. wrote:

daseb wrote:So why arent coldplay copping shit for being rich activists? Is it because we already know they're terrible? Or because they're so safe and bland that there's no way they'd ever be as controversial as to say 'pigs shoot people sometimes'?

largely the second one. Coldplay have as much capacity for controversy (or creating a conversation) as orange marmalade. Just because you're in the band that every Stepford wife in training of a certain age wanted to lose their virginity to doesn't mean you actually mean shit.

White people have a terrible, oppressive habit of engaging black activism at the level of strategy rather than substance.