When Beyoncé performed her new song, “Formation,” at Super Bowl 50 and released the accompanying video, she made an unapologetic statement supporting black pride and culture. Not surprisingly, conservative media whipped white people into a frenzy with a scaremongering fixation on the stylistic and symbolic references to the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter.
All these messages and reactions are a snapshot of the current state of race relations in the United States right now, with much of the underlying meaning being drowned out. As such, it’s not surprising that it takes satire to show some people just what the country really looks like, as “Saturday Night Live” did this weekend with an opening segment titled, “White People Lose Their Damn Minds.”
In the video, parodying a horror film or disaster flick, white people everywhere wake up to the fact that Beyoncé is actually black rather than the presumed “white” her celebrity status nearly affords her in the skit. They are horrified to learn the truth and proceed to run amok about the nation. There is looting, hiding under desks, mass hysteria, and chaos.
Meanwhile, black office workers and pedestrians look on dryly disappointed and justifiably angry in turn as white people reveal their deep prejudices in their overreaction.
That’s the “fun” of the segment, and it is fun, and funny to poke at white naivety surrounding race and racism. It’s a light-hearted way to point out to white folks that they have some work to do.
But the meat of the segment comes in the playful manner in which other black people are somehow adopted by white people as “acceptable” black folks— folks white folks “don’t see as black” or “think of as white”— that old “colorblindness” kicking in.
Instead of recognizing and embracing, even celebrating our differences, this video makes fun of the tendency to instead mash everyone into one homogeneous lump of “human,” or humanity. In fact, Beyoncé even mentions her light-skinned features in the lyrics, referring to her “yellow-boned” complexion which is so often commented on in the media and by fans, but is also part of a deeper conversation within the black community about skin tone.
All in all, the video hits home with the insanity of white prejudice and racism in contemporary America. Hopefully, it can not only make us laugh, but make us learn something, too. But at the end of the day, as the skit so humorously states for those white people who still don’t understand, “Maybe the song isn’t for us.”
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