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

And, as I had to remind a Black Baby Boomer who wanted to put forth the same argument as Belafonte’s on a Facebook thread regarding the Huffington Post Live debate, quite a few people many not have participated in the sit-in and other protests during the Civil Right Movement due the real material fear of losing their jobs, but they did their own activism by putting some extra money in the offering trays to serve as the protesters’ bail money. He promptly hushed.

Oh yeah…there was Beyoncé’s “faked” pregnancy. Some Black female performers I knew slagged that Beyoncé’s couldn’t possibly have been pregnant because she would’ve “gotten fat like her mother,” Tina Knowles. No, these women and other Beyoncé baby-bump conspiracy theorists opined, a surrogate mother carried Blue Ivy Knowles-Carter, and Beyoncé carried some contraption that made her look pregnant, which gave her an excuse to gain whatever weight she wanted. Not that a more likely possibility could have been that she was actually, factually pregnant and that, due to her probably being in top physical condition because she’s exercising via her dancing, could have had the theoretical “training effect” going on, which kept her baby weight to a certain poundage…or something like that. Nope, deflating pregnancy suits and surrogate moms. Well, the only remotely conspiratorial thing that happened with Blue Ivy’s birth was that the hospital that handled it received complaints from non-famous parents that organization placed the Knowles-Carters’ privacy above and beyond the other parents’ right to have access to their own newborns, some of whom were born premature. (Lenox Hospital dismissed the other parents’ claims.) The most unfortunate thing about this slaggy theory is that Beyoncé had her gestating and birthing experience marred by having to negate the rumors–which hews a little too closely to Black cis women’s reproductive decisions and life constantly and, more insidiously, publicly questioned, from the Moynihan Report to the questions-wrapped-up-in-a-stereotype of the Welfare Queen to the anti-abortion billboards accusing Black cis women of literally having unsafe wombs or killing a future president.

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