“parental advisory. explicit lyrics.”<\/p>\n
The first shot of Beyonce’s “Formation” music video opens up with a computer screen reading these sentences above. The next shot is Beyonce sitting on top of a sinking police car, nonchalant, staring into the camera. The opening scene, with “parental advisory” on it, is a nod to how Black people and culture have been censored in America, how things like hip-hop and rap have become synonymous with words like “thug” and “gang,” meant to fear-monger the population into thinking that Black culture is something to be afraid of. This is a contributing factor to the presence of police brutality in our country; it seems every week there is a new senseless death of a Black person at the hands of a white cop. Just recently, Daunte Wright lost his life when twenty-six-year veteran police officer Kim Potter shot him with a gun “thinking it was a taser.”<\/p>\n
The “parental advisory” warning is also a jab at the ever present “Oh, let’s not talk about race,” “Let’s not bring race into this,” “Can we not talk about politics?” (politics, in this case, being a word substituted for human rights, which is not politics and should never be treated as such). People, especially white people who have never experienced systemic racism, are sensitive to talking about topics like a race because they don’t want to admit wrongdoing, they don’t want to admit something is wrong with the American system. They want to preserve their country as the “best country in the world” without acknowledging how many people are suffering from what this country was built on: slavery, sexism, classism, exclusivity, and hate. Beyonce’s song “Formation” interrupts this rhetoric. She isn’t afraid to show the dark corners of society while simultaneously expressing Black Joy in her music video, because oftentimes too many pop culture films, songs, and other forms of media focus on the suffering of Black people. Beyonce takes care to show how Black Joy is still present even when facing police brutality and systemic racism, how Black culture isn’t something to villainize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“parental advisory. explicit lyrics.” The first shot of Beyonce’s “Formation” music video opens up with a computer screen reading these sentences above. The next shot is Beyonce sitting on top of a sinking police car, nonchalant, staring into the camera. The opening scene, with “parental advisory” on it, is a nod to how Black people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4585,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4585"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7446,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442\/revisions\/7446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}