Following Beyoncé’s very good, very black performance at the Super Bowl, a collection of people with little to do and even less sense announced that they would be holding an anti-Beyoncé rally at the NFL headquarters.
Great idea, guys. That’ll show her. Unfortunately for the anti-Beyoncé movement, they don’t seem like a particularly dedicated bunch: Nobody showed up for the protest. The demonstration was supposed to be held at 8am today and was organized by something called Proud of the Blues, which is both a terrible and ironically perfect name.
I can sort of forgive them for the disorganization. This is a group of people who have probably never had the rights afforded to them by the Constitution or human decency threatened in a serious way, so all this hootin’ and hollerin’ about discrimination is new territory.
Luckily for those who cannot stomach the sight of a black woman singing and dancing about how happy she is to be black in between their buffalo wings and inauthentic salsa, a sheriff in Tennessee is holding down the anti-Beyoncé, almost definitely pro-shooting black people faction.
On Monday night, someone fired shots outside the home of Rutherford County Sheriff Robert Arnold. Naturally, this morning Arnold decided to hold a press conference about the shooting in which not a single person was injured. During this highly necessary press conference, Sheriff Arnold suggested that the shooting was motivated by Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video and Super Bowl performance. He was being completely serious.
Referencing a spike in shootings of law enforcement officials, Sheriff Arnold did some real smart detective work and traced it all the back to Beyoncé. You can watch the video here.
Once I kind of figured everything out, you know, with everything since the half at the Super Bowl and with law enforcement as a whole. I mean I think we’ve lost five to seven officers. Five deputy chairs since Sunday’s Super Bowl. You know that’s what I’m thinking, you know, here’s another target on law enforcement.
He later added:
Well you have Beyoncé’s video and how that’s kind of bled over into other things it seems like about law enforcement.
Yes, of course. I can see it now.
Two young thugs, (black, of course) watch “Formation” on loop for hours. One thug turns to the other thug and says in ebonics: I know that the United States has a long, bloody history of law enforcement discriminating against and regularly gunning down black people for no godly reason whatsoever other than the fact that they were alive and black. Sure, there are a million reasons for the racial tension between black and white people in this country and police officers often serve as living, breathing metaphors for the government’s continued interest in breaking us down financially, physically and spiritually. Obviously you can see the tangible effects of this damage all around us in our food, schools and mental health. But damn, it’s this Beyoncé music video that’s really clarifying things for me. Grab your hoodie and your gat, Tyrone, we’re about to go shoot some warning shots outside the home of some local sheriff.
Alternatively, we should remember that this did occur in Tennessee’s Rutherford County, an area that’s 85 percent white. So maybe somebody was just celebrating Taylor Swift winning a Grammy and things got a little out of hand.
These have been the latest updates in white people losing their goddamn minds over a song about a black woman enjoying being black but not enjoying unarmed black people being murdered by police officers. Also, Red Lobster.
Contact the author at kara.brown@jezebel.com .
Screenshot via Beyonce.
