Beyonce's Formation - a call for battle against white people, or a proud African-American woman expressing her pride?

IMHO, first and foremost, Beyonce is a QUEEN. She is extraordinarily talented, blessed with amazing singing and dancing prowess, she seems unbelievably cool and she is downright beautiful to boot. Since her time in Destiny's Child, Beyonce has been calling for independence as a woman. While my understanding is that she did not label herself as such in her early solo years, it became undoubtedly clear in her On the Run tour in 2014 that Beyonce is a feminist - which is awesome, despite frequent criticism of her kind of feminism (no one's perfect and at least she's trying!).

Beyonce is also an African-American, news that was apparently shocking to a lot of white Americans after watching the 2016 Superbowl half-time show. Her recently released song, 'Formation', which she performed at the show and for which she had released a video the day before, is about black empowerment and Beyonce's pride in not only her family history and where she came from, but in where and who she is now: a hugely powerful role model, a style icon and one, very equal half of the mainstream music industry's (the world's?) biggest power couple - and additionally, she is quite, quite wealthy. 'Formation' does the job of basically shutting down haters as well. Over the years, Beyonce has been criticised for a number of things, including being "yellow-boned" referring to her lighter, honey-toned skin; for her daughter's hair, which inspired some rude woman in America to create a Change.org petition asking Beyonce and Jay-Z to "comb their daughter's hair" - WTF? - and also for allegedly getting a nose job - she didn't, by the way, and in 'Formation', she sings, "I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils".

This song, which aside from being immensely important is actually really amazing, is not about white people, contrary to what a lot of people believe. As Margaret Cho put it in an interview with Bill Maher, "Black pride doesn't have to take anything away from white culture... it can exist on its own." Just because Beyonce is calling her ladies to "get in formation", does not necessarily mean she is telling them to go and "kill whites", whatever Bill Maher (an apparent expert on blackness and Beyonce) says. I have taken a quote used on the Genius page, which provides a meaning to each line of 'Formation', from Zandria F. Robinson:

"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. [...] Formation, then, is a metaphor, a black feminist, black queer, and black queer feminist theory of community organising and resistance. [...] 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 organisers do in neighbourhoods and organisations. To slay the violence of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, we must start, Beyonce argues, with the proper formation."

Just a little dose of truth for ya

It's astounding (or is it really?) that in 2016, white people cannot reconcile with the idea of black culture rising up and taking pride in their blackness without seeing it as a threat. It reminds me of the ridiculous arguments against the term 'feminism', because why isn't it egalitarianism? (The answer is, in brief, because women are the oppressed gender who are impacted with issues of gender equality and it is the deeply entrenched perceptions of women as inferior to men that we desperately need to change) And also the 'black lives matter' vs 'all lives matter' debate - obviously, all lives matter but it is not all lives that are systemically oppressed and given far fewer opportunities, nor were all lives being killed by police five times more often than white people in 2015.

Real Time with Bill Maher: Beyoncé's Formation (HBO)

On Real Time with Bill Maher (in the same interview referred to above with Margaret Cho), Michael "Killer Mike" Render, a hip-hop artist, says that 'Formation' is Beyonce saying to other black people, "I like being black, this is the type of black that I am, I like the fact my daughter's black, I like my Michael Jackson nose, I like my child with an afro - I like me! White people, that conversation wasn't even for you." And he's right. Yes, Beyonce is suggesting a need for an organisational end to "the violence of white supremacist heteropatriarchy" (read: not white individuals), but she's also talking about the backlash against her own appearance, her and her husband's success and her daughter. The message of 'Formation' was not to scare or threaten white people - institutionally, that's impossible given white hegemony, even if she is Queen Bey - it was to empower black people who have been continually, systemically pushed down by dominant white culture for literally centuries. Any reference to the Black Panther or Black Power organisations isn't necessarily bad, either - as Killer Mike says, these movements weren't just pro-black, they were a "socialist group for any down-trodden people" including Asians, and they wanted to educate all people. They resorted to violence against white people sometimes, and I wonder where they learned that that was an acceptable method? White culture will seemingly do anything to forget the horrendous, hugely significant mistakes they made and the violence they themselves began. Furthermore, reading about the Black Panther movement I learned that they were originally called the 'Black Panther Party for Self-Defense', designed to monitor police brutality in California in the 1960s. Go figure.

People were also outraged at the images of a young African-American boy standing with his hands raised in front of a line of policemen in her music video for 'Formation'. I've read that the police and their myriad supporters were particularly offended at this portrayal of the police force. But, let's be real - is it all that unfounded? There are some amazing policemen out there, but there are seemingly just as many awful ones, and then there are those who don't know they are racist; they've just learned it in an inherently racist institution. Unwitting or not, it is still racism. The depiction isn't intended to criticise individual officers, it is speaking out against the institutional racism that killed Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy merely playing with his toy, Michael Brown, killed (while most likely running away, not advancing) for cigarettes that he may or may not have stolen (they're just cigarettes?!), and Eric Garner, who was suffocated to death while begging to be released, and many, many more young black men and women who have died in police custody. 'Formation' similarly opposes that same institutional racism that lets these policemen go free without so much as an apology to the victims' families, that allows white people to have more lenient convictions than people of colour, and that continues to keep people of colour in lesser social, economic, political and cultural positions than white people.

Nevertheless, 'Formation' is a message of positivity, pride and empowerment to black people; it's a celebration of blackness. Any reference to white culture is because it has shaped black culture so much. As Margaret Cho said about the song, "[...] It's what black America needed, it's what all of us needed - it's really important." So, to all the undoubtedly racist and unjustifiably aggrieved white people: in your dreams, Beyonce is so not singing about you.

And to quote the Queen, "You know you that b**** when you cause all this conversation/Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper".