To ban her presence is to give in to the lie that Black women and other women of color have nothing of value worth teaching. We know that is simply not true.
Pop star Beyoncé Knowles-Carter continues to be a catalyst for cultural debates. This is what elevates her from a mere entertainer into the realm of artist and even musical genius. In 2022, a high school teacher in New Hampshire was banned from teaching Beyoncé’s song and music video for “Formation,” along with Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” The songs and videos were considered in violation of a new local law modeled after Trump’s executive order seeking to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) in public schools. Although this executive order was repealed under President Joe Biden’s administration, many conservatives took up this anti-CRT fight on the state level.
Fortunately, a judge struck down this ban, claiming it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process law. This ruling sets a precedent for how similar impending cases might be treated. This issue is a reminder of the importance of this year’s elections and what we have to protect when it comes to equal rights under the law and freedom of speech and expression.
Obviously, this is bigger than Beyoncé. However, the pop star has become an avatar held up in our culture wars between left versus right, communities of color versus white supremacists (mostly but not only white), and anti-racist feminism versus misogynoir.
Before Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones became a lightning rod for how we understand this nation’s origin story through the prism of slavery, Beyoncé had already ignited cultural controversy in 2016 when her music video for and halftime guest performance of “Formation” at the Super Bowl. Her performances mobilized the politics of #BlackLivesMatter and radical, sartorial expressions that invoked the militant Black Panthers. The music video included images of the pop star sinking a police cruiser in the post-Katrina floodwaters of New Orleans and a young boy—conjuring the ghosts of slain victims like Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice—dancing defiantly before a line of riot police just before a graffitied sign implored the same law enforcement to “stop shooting us.”
In 2016, when Beyoncé herself was already aligned with the Obamas and the progressive politics they represented at the time, she became the target of a “police boycott.” Later that year, she was greeted with an undercurrent of hostility (if not outright) from the mostly conservative country-music listening audience when she sang alongside the already controversial Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks) at the Country Music Awards.
Such sentiments might have foreshadowed the impending election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, but they also propelled Beyoncé to embark on a three-act project. The fruits of her labor are flourishing, most recently with the release of Cowboy Carter, an album that refutes her rejection from the country music genre through a larger reclamation of African American culture as integral to U.S. history, politics, and culture.
This is why popular culture matters. Not only does it exist in the public sphere where we articulate our values and our engagements of difference and with different communities, but also the frame of reference through which we can dialogue on issues of humor, current events, religion, gender, race, and a host of present-day concerns.
Consider the Fourteenth Amendment, for example. Ratified three years after the Thirteenth Amendment ended chattel slavery, this constitutional amendment did the necessary work of extending citizenship to the millions of African Americans born in this country, subsequently voiding the Supreme Court Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, which denied Black citizenship rights. The Fourteenth Amendment not only established birthright citizenship, equal protections, and due process under the law, but also laid the foundation that enabled Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other laws pertaining to women’s rights, disability rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. Granted, we have already seen how the Supreme Court—much liked their nineteenth-century predecessors who denied African American citizenship and installed legal racial segregation through Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—has gutted the Voting Rights Act, overturned Roe v. Wade and revoked affirmative action in college admissions. None of our laws are safe, as long as cultural expressions can lead to the types of legal and political interpretations that would deny the basic rights of those who are most marginalized in our society.
This is why popular culture matters. Not only does it exist in the public sphere where we articulate our values and our engagements of difference and with different communities, but also the frame of reference through which we can dialogue on issues of humor, current events, religion, gender, race, and a host of present-day concerns.
This is what the New Hampshire teacher intended when she brought Beyoncé into the classroom to provide a present-day analogy of the cultural politics explored in her lessons on the history of the Harlem Renaissance. Perhaps we should be relieved that the anti-CRT law did not target her teaching of African American history in general, but rather the interpretation of Beyoncé and other contemporary hip-hop artists as somehow “divisive” tellingly reveals the targets of the law.
Beyoncé, who continues the legacy of Renaissance artists like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes—not only with her album “Lemonade‘ but also Black is King and her Act I dance album and documentary film for “Renaissance”—dares to suggest that African Americans are vital to U.S. culture and are equally worthy subjects that require our attention and recognition of their value through their inclusion in our cultural heritage. Their artistry suggests that American culture is not inherently or by default one of whiteness.
Only white supremacists would find such values “divisive.” I have contributed to cultural criticisms on Black feminist artists like Beyoncé, and have taught important scholarly works that arose out of the teaching of Beyoncé, including Kevin Allred’s Ain’t I a Diva? (2019) and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Beyoncé in Formation (2018), which stem from their respective college courses on “Politicizing Beyoncé” and “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism.” I can attest to the enriching intellectual debates and conversations that enable students to rethink the raced and gendered dimensions power, place, and artistry based in race and gender. From Candice Benbow’s Lemonade Syllabus, a public pedagogy project helping lay persons to critically engage Beyoncé’s Lemonade, to Reverend Yolanda M. Norton’s Beyoncé Mass, another public project, based in worship, stemming from her college course on “Beyoncé and the Hebrew Bible,” the pop star is a springboard from which to engage conversations of power, self-acceptance, political flaws and everyday feminism, capitalist pursuits versus liberation dreams.
Now is not the time to ban Beyoncé from the classroom. She commands our students’ attention and provides a frame of reference from which they can engage in several issues. To ban her presence is to give in to the lie that Black women and other women of color have nothing of value worth teaching. We know that is simply not true.
Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” has already mapped out for us an intellectual terrain to trace—one in which we must pay attention to how the forces of racism and misogyny which meet us at the crossroads to double down on discrimination and oppression.
Crenshaw is the theory; Beyoncé is the practice. In other words, our laws emerge from our culture, and those we hold up as culture bearers—including our pop stars—have the power to elevate the status of those most marginalized and to make visible our different political struggles. They have the power to say our lives matter, Black lives matter, Black feminist lives matter.
In these culture wars, we won’t back down and will continue to walk on the paths that our ancestors paved and inspired—including laws like the Fourteenth Amendment, which can be invoked to protect our rights and due process. Or, as Beyoncé herself succinctly put it in her militant “Black Parade”: “Ancestors put me on game.”
May we remember these battles have not subsided and that we will eventually win since, to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Justice can only prevail when we know our histories, contribute equally to our cultures and open the doors and our minds to vibrant liberatory classrooms.
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