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How Beyoncé Slayed the Super Bowl and Fox News

How Beyoncé Slayed the Super Bowl and Fox News

Last updated on: February 11, 2016 at 9:30 am by Adam Ericksen

How Beyoncé Slayed the Super Bowl and Fox News 2016-02-11T09:30:08-05:00 Adam Ericksen

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Beyoncé at the Super Bowl (Image: Screenshot from YouTube channel On Line Trending)

…we are more than conquerors …

-St. Paul, Romans 8:37

Beyoncé slays. And she is more than a conqueror.

But before I tell you how Beyoncé slayed the Super Bowl and Fox News, I’m going to tell you about the ancient sacrificial rituals and their victims. (Trust me, this fits.)

Sacrificial Rituals in the Ancient World

In the ancient world, whenever there was social chaos, social order was created through a ritual of sacrificial violence. These sacrificial rituals channeled conflicts that threatened the life of the community onto an individual who was blamed for the chaos that threatened the group.

The community survived this social crisis by uniting against a common enemy. The 20th century anthropologist René Girard called this common enemy the “scapegoat.” After the scapegoat was sacrificed, a sense of peace and reconciliation fell upon the community. But it was only temporary. When conflicts re-emerged within the community, the ritual of sacrificial violence would repeat … over and over again.

The scapegoat had something that marked him as “different.” Sometimes the sacrificial victim had a limp or was blind or was captured from another tribe. The specific mark of the sacrificial victim didn’t really matter; what mattered was that the victim play the proper role of the scapegoat.

The scapegoat’s proper role was to remain quiet as the larger community channeled their collective conflicts onto him during the ritual. It was crucial that the sacrificial victim remain silent, or that their cries were drowned out by the pounding of a drum, chants, and prayers. That’s because the last thing that the sacrificers wanted was to hear the voice of their scapegoat. If they heard their victim’s voice, it would pierce their conscience and they would risk becoming aware of their own ritual violence and the innocence of their scapegoat.

Girard tells us that this was how ancient sacrificial rituals functioned, but we see the same ritual of sacrificial violence at work in in the modern world. Sadly, we humans have not evolved much beyond our sacrificial ancestors. We continue to silence the voice of our scapegoats. Indeed, white America has been silencing the voices of black people for 400 years through rituals of physical, political, and economic violence.

How Beyoncé Slayed the Modern Sacrificial Ritual

But make no mistake, Beyoncé is no victim. She is a conqueror because her voice will not be silenced. Yet, her black skin bears the mark of the American sacrificial system of racism. Unfortunately, that system is alive and well. In fact, it’s trying to silence her voice.

On Sunday, Beyoncé took to the main stage of American pop culture, the Super Bowl, and delivered a politically charged message to the United States. Beyoncé and her back up dancers claimed black power by dressing like Black Panthers from the 1960s. She performed her new song, Formation, which tells her story of being black in America.

The white power structures were offended, so they fought back. Fox News interviewed Rudy Giuliani about the half time show. The interview is a text book case in America’s 400 year history of ritually silencing black voices. The segment shows four white people critiquing Beyoncé’s performance and the black lives matter movement. They lectured Beyoncé on her performance. One commentator said, “In the end we find out that Beyoncé dressed up in a tribute to the Black Panthers, (the dancers) went to a Malcom X formation, and the song, the lyrics, which I couldn’t make out a syllable, were basically telling cops to stop shooting blacks!”

One way that white people continue the ritual of silencing black voices is to make them into the violent enemy seeking power. It’s a ritual as old as America itself. And it’s the kind of fear mongering that Fox News was fomenting by referring to the Black Panthers and Malcom X. The assumption is that black people are the violent ones, but it is black people who suffer from violence at a disproportionate rate.

I believe in nonviolence, but frankly, it’s hard for me to listen to white people as they criticize black people for advocating violence. In the face of 400 years of physical, emotional, social, and economic violence, I think a violent response would be understandable.

But that’s not what Beyoncé is advocating, nor is it what the Black Lives Matter movement is about. Formation is Beyoncé’s call for a political revolution, but it’s not a revolution based on violence. It’s a revolution based on the power of the spoken word.

In Formation, Beyoncé says that she “slays,” but her homage to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the video tells me she isn’t slaying through physical violence. She is a conqueror, but in the spirit of St. Paul, she is more than a conqueror. That’s because she isn’t advocating physical violence. It’s a lie to claim that she is. Rather, she slays through something much more powerful – the spoken word.

And so I shake my head, asking myself, how dare Fox News criticize Beyoncé for “basically telling cops to stop shooting blacks” when we know that “unarmed black men are seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire”?

Here’s the truth about Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance – the power of her words have pierced the conscience of white America. She is a conqueror because her voice will not be silenced. She refuses to play the proper role that much of white America expects her to play. She slays by speaking the truth about violence against not only black people, but against all people at the margins of American culture. As the New South Negress puts it, Formation “is a recognition of one another at the blackness margins – woman, queer, genderqueer, trans, poor, disables, undocumented, immigrant…”

So, to answer my question above, how does a commentator on Fox News and his fellow co-hosts dare attempt to silence the voice of Beyoncé? They dare it because their collective conscience has been pierced. They have heard Beyoncé’s voice. And in her voice they hear the voice of all those on the margins who suffer from systemic violence against the marginalized.

One way white people manage the voice of the marginalized that pierces our conscience is to lecture them and accuse them of being the violent ones. That’s what Fox News did.

But another way is to listen to those voices. Listen to the ways that we white folks participate in systemic racism that empowers not only police brutality, but economic oppression, enabling “the typical white family [to have] about 16 times as much wealth as the typical black family – and [enables] white households headed up by a high school dropout to have, on average, twice the wealth of black and Latino households headed by a college graduate.”

Beyoncé is slaying our conscience. Like the Word of God is compared to a sword that cuts through our ancient rituals of scapegoating so that we hear the voice of the oppressed, Beyoncé is slaying through the racism that infect the United States. She pierced the white conscience and is making many of us uncomfortable. Good for her. Let’s stop trying to drown out her voice by lecturing black people. Instead, let’s listen to their voices.

Do you feel Beyoncé’s words piercing your conscience? She has pierced mine. And that’s a good thing. Pay attention to that piercing and listen to more black voices crying out for a revolution of the American system of racism.

Photo: Beyoncé at the Super Bowl (Image: Screenshot from YouTube channel On Line Trending)

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