ESSAY: Beyoncé's "reclamation of America"

A dispatch from MetLife Stadium last night

Last night at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, America got a talking-to. And so did I.

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter performed her “Cowboy Carter” tour act over three hours in a stubborn May rain. It was full of what one might expect from one of the most ambitious artists of our time: literal and vocal pyrotechnics, costume changes that on their own justified the ticket, a buffet of music going back decades, video art that painted a personal narrative and situated her in a cultural lineage and political tradition, the inclusion of her kids, a seemingly spontaneous gender reveal, and more.

Yet I couldn’t help but notice that there was something else going on, both underneath and over top of everything else, both subliminally and very, very not subliminally. Beyoncé was telling a whole nation: Fuck fatalism. Ditch your despair. To save America, reclaim America.

In case you didn’t get the message’s more subtle incarnations, she repeatedly put up on a big screen an image of herself in a sash that said, “The reclamation of America.”

ICYMI, as they say.

Today a right-wing populist authoritarian movement — fueled by racism and xenophobia and misogyny and nativism and the hatred of anyone who doesn’t fit some impossible definition of who a person is allowed to be — has captured the government of the United States. Its force is immense. Its project is ambitious and lethal. It is doing great damage. It is linked to allied movements worldwide.

In the face of such movements, there is the question of how to respond. There are those who suggest laying low and waiting for self-immolation. There are those who suggest safe ideas, incremental policies, no jazz hands. There are those who seize on these developments to talk about how terrible America always has been, in fact, that this is just more naked now. There are those who dream of Portugal. There are those who march and fight back. And there are those who speak as though it has already happened, the country has been lost, everything is ruined, how sad to lose it all.

Fuck your despair, Beyoncé is telling you, though she was raised too well to say that.

Last night at MetLife we all got a talking-to about another way of meeting the moment. By wrapping herself in the flag, in image after image, costume after costume, song after song (she snuck in the national anthem), she made an emphatic case for refusing to concede patriotism, a mistake progressive forces in American life have long and disastrously made. Do not let them be the arbiters of who belongs.

Without needing to make it explicit — leave it to lesser artists like me to do that crass translation — she got in the face of MAGA every few minutes. She did so both deniably and undeniably. She did so without lapsing into academic jargon of inclusion or “woke” terminology. Rather, she celebrated what it looks like when everyone has a voice, when no one is cowed, when history is not erased, when everyone is liberated, when women are loud and powerful, when who you love doesn’t determine your level of safety, when you can be proud of your roots, when love triumphs over cruelty.

The crowd was the crowd of the emerging country, whose birth even Donald Trump doesn’t have the power to abort. It was a crowd of many colors and histories, a crowd of all kinds, less confined to the identity boxes of the past, a crowd of complexities. The crowd was its own rejection of the rejections at the heart of the MAGA project.

Beyoncé once again reminded her audience that the nostalgia for an imaginary past that seethes on the right is rooted in ignorance and denial. She frontally took on those cable pundits who said she was ruining country music, with only the most thinly veiled racism, putting up their “punditry” right there on big screens. And then she revealed the lie by showing you the rich tradition of Black country artistry in whose footsteps she followed. Nostalgia isn’t just bad for the neck. It brings on blindness.

This is a boxed country now. You are in this tribe, or that one, and everyone has gatekeepers. We live in an age in which movements that need to grow to survive and win devote more energy to moral background checks than recruitment. Beyoncé defied the boxes, claiming all the inheritances and memberships at once, basking in being, as she calls it in one song, “contradicted.” She is a daughter and granddaughter of civil rights, she is a part of a tradition of revolution, she is an avatar of financial aspiration, she is a feminist, she is a boss, she is a southerner, she is a country musician, she is a rapper, she is a legatee, she is an innovator, she is, she is, she is.

As I watched her, I felt jolted into a realization. The idea of losing the country can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fuck that capitulation. She is not capitulating. You shouldn’t either. This is her country. This is your country. This is my country. Reclaim it. Remember that politics is downstream of culture, and you have to make your case in the culture if you are to have any hope down where politics begins. Refuse the stories that erase you. Refuse the idea that they can steal your country from you.

Welcome to the reclamation of America.

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