Dear Brandeis community,

 

Like many of you, I imagine, and certainly like much of the country, I have been thinking a great deal these past weeks about Beyoncé’s “Formation” video, which was released the Saturday of Super Bowl weekend. The video offers a complex exploration of race and power, and was given even more cultural cachet than a Beyoncé video would normally have by virtue of her scene-stealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. There was some amount of hue and cry after that performance, with Fox News describing it as an attack on police—a hysteria that Saturday Night Live parodied brilliantly this past weekend with its “The Day Beyoncé Turned Black” skit.

The “Formation” video itself is set in New Orleans, with sunken houses and cop cars situating us as viewers firmly in a post-Katrina landscape. The song explores Beyoncé’s black identity—her hair and nose, her relationship to money and ownership, her connection to her country roots—and like much of her work of the past few years, offers as well a complex vision of feminism. Among my favorite lines in the song are those she sings to an unidentified “you” about what she can do for him—take him shopping, get his song played on the radio—before this fascinating couplet: “You might just be a black Bill Gates in the making / I might just be a black Bill Gates in the making.” Coming from the historically doubly marginalized perspective of a black woman, it’s a powerful reversal—she is both breadwinner and CEO, visionary, or mogul.

Even more so than gender, however, it is most significantly regarding race that the video challenges us to think. Near the end of the video is a scene of a young boy dancing in front of a row of police officers in riot gear, and as he throws up his arms triumphantly the officers raise their arms, mimicking the “hands up, don’t shoot” posture that became a gesture of protest as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Immediately following that scene is a shot of graffiti on a wall, reading “Stop Shooting Us.”

I would agree with writer dream hampton in the NPR interview linked above, in that these scenes don’t suggest to me that Beyoncé has become an activist—any more than I would draw the same conclusion from Kendrick Lamar’s powerful performance at the Grammys this past weekend. Rather, I am interested in what these moments in pop culture can teach us about the world that we live in and, by extension, about ourselves. One of my favorite quotes about what we see when looking at a work of art comes from the cultural critic Theodor Adorno:

This quote is from a wonderful essay of Adorno’s called “Is Art Lighthearted?” It is one of the two epigraphs of my dissertation, written what now feels like lifetimes ago, on rap music and poetry, and has always stood as one of my most essential definitions of art: an aesthetic field where the contradictions of history and society are held in tension, made visible, and hopefully transformed.

What I see in looking at both “Formation” and its reception is the degree to which race remains a largely invisible category in the United States—and how we are made uncomfortable by the foregrounding of race, even in a music video. I see the histories of slavery and oppression, of systemic racism. I see the tension between some of our most spectacularly successful individuals and our most deeply troubled communities. I see echoes of our own histories, as members of a uniquely diverse Bay Area Jewish community that still has a great deal of good work on race ahead.

This week, here at Brandeis, we’re having some of our own conversations about race, inviting our 8^th graders to reflect on microaggressions in advisory using this video. It’s a small step toward making some of the contradictions in our own community a bit more visible, one that I hope will help prepare our students to more actively participate in the big conversations around the tensions of our city, our nation, and our world.

Wishing you all weekends full of meaningful contradictions, my friends,

 

Dan