Something interesting is happening to the ubiquitous back-slapping fests that dominate celebrity coverage: they are becoming fiercely politicised. I don’t mean just the odd liberal speech or cause that is paid lip service by some luvvie, I mean lines are being drawn. The Oscars row about “diversity” is not going to go away. Nor should it. Last night Simon Amstell introduced the Evening Standard Film Awards by saying it had been “another great year for white men”. He then handed the best actor prize to Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation. Elba, who has been vocal about this issue, said “a change is coming”.
Meanwhile, at the Super Bowl – not an awards ceremony but a huge set piece event in the US, one of the most watched events in the world in fact - Beyoncé and her dancers performed her new single Formation and no one could be left in any doubt what was on her mind. She unabashedly referenced the Black Panthers, and made Black Power salutes, all while asserting her own cultural and ethnic identity. Formation is about where she comes from and where she is going. It’s quite something.
Beyonce was described in some quarters last night as looking “unapologetically black” - a reference to a key criticism of her, in the past, that she was somehow too white. Her dancers summoned images of revolution by dancing in an X formation that reminded us of Malcolm X and the Black Pride movement.
That this played out on mainstream TV is significant, as is the superb new video for Formation. Here, this superstar locates herself in time and place – in other words, in her own political history. A black woman of the south, she remembers Katrina, the aftermath of which made clear to many the then-President Bush’s open reluctance to care for the black population. She shows the “Stop shooting us” graffiti of the present, a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement. Backstage at Super Bowl, her dancers held up a sign saying, “Justice 4 Mario Woods”, a black man shot dead by several police in San Francisco for refusing to drop a knife.
This is not some sudden awakening for Beyonce – she has given £7 million to the homeless in Houston, her home city, she and her husband Jay Z have bailed out Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore. But now she is moving this highly visible assertion of identity centre stage. Her blackness, her femaleness, her pride, her politics, are not some kind of mysterious subtext.
It’s impossible to miss, just as the arguments around the Oscars and “whiteness” are impossible to miss. This matters right now, as the presidential candidates line up in the states, and the rhetoric around race becomes more and more polarised. Donald Trump has said of Black Lives Matter: “I think they’re trouble. I think they’re looking for trouble.” Hillary Clinton seeks to shore up the black votes she thinks are rightfully hers. She has had several faltering conversations in which she talks of systemic change. Her ground is not as sure as it once was because these new activists are sick of promises.
The assumption that they will be represented by the white political system is being challenged. The more Black Lives Matter is ignored or bypassed politically, the more it will be present culturally. Artists like Beyoncé and Janelle Monae (who has been speaking out on this issue too) are amazingly powerful. What is striking is that they are no longer asking to be “let in” to the culture. They are the culture.
