Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Beyoncé (With Shout-Outs To Tina Turner)

By Andrea Plaid

Beyonce Knowles-Carter. Via wallpapersbest.net

I find myself increasingly defending someone whom I otherwise wouldn’t look around at or wouldn’t listen to: Beyoncé.

I haven’t converted to listening to her discography: To me, she sounds like every other Black female soloist in a Black church choir, so her voice–her timbre and melisma–isn’t unicorn-unique to my ears. In fact, I find it gratingly common because I heard so many women with her voice every Sunday from the age of five to my late twenties; Beyoncé just has a better production team.

And, as I’ve said on the R, her female-empowerment messages aren’t my feminism:

[S]ome of folks who see Bey as “girl power” may have never heard of Valenti or may even want to be bothered with her writings or what they perceive to be “white feminism” that she embodies. Bey is their feminist text and their idea–and ideal. And whatnot…On the real though, Bey is not my sort of feminism–and that’s not blasphemous to say. Then again, neither were the Spice Girls…or the Riot Grrls, for that matter. And I remember folks tripped on each of those pop-cultural “generations” of feminist representations, too, trying to figure out their effects on younger people.

Feminism is rather malleable as each generation figures out what it means to them, even when we’re fighting the same old battles.  Or because of them.

And let’s not forget Beyoncé now-notorious photo layout in French Vogue, which she said was an homage to “African queens in the past” and “African rituals”:

And I was quite happy to leave Beyoncé to her ideas about race pride and “girl power” with a genuinely heartfelt “bless her heart”…until Harry Belafonte came along.

As some Racializens may remember, Belafonte accused the younger generations of celebrities like Beyoncé and her spouse Jay-Z of not doing their fair share of activism, meaning feet in the streets and speaking out on the pressing issues of the day. I defended her philanthropy, like her giving her paycheck from Cadillac Records to a drug rehab center and her working with FLOTUS Obama on the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” campaign, as her form of activism. As I said to the Huffington Post Live producers when they e-interviewed me about my take on the kerfuffle:

“Harry Belafonte is defining activism in a rather narrow way…for Belafonte to say Beyoncé is doing activism wrong because that’s not the way he does it is a bit off-putting. For people like Beyoncé, what they’re doing is activism; they are bringing awareness to an issue in their own way.”

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