femme-esq:Many people discuss this particular image of Beyonce’s Formation video as “anti police.”
femme-esq:Many people discuss this particular image of Beyonce’s Formation video as “anti police.” There are many reasons this is a ridiculous interpretation. Here are my favorite two reasons:1) Art in the face of violence is the only ultimate end to violence. This is because, at a very high level of generality, even justified acts of violence, such as those taken in self-defense, still perpetuate violence. And, as we have seen many times, even wen the oppressed react totally justifiably, by defending themselves violently against a violent oppressor, the oppressor simply makes it worse and creates more violence and pain. Creating art, on the other hand, does not perpetuate violence. Making and performing art, such as dance, until the coercive power of the state surrenders is the only act of resistance that will ultimately decimate that power. It is essentially and wholly impossible to violently defend against people making art AT you in a legitimate fashion. Only fascists would do that. So, by showing the cops surrendering, Beyonce shows that she has enough hope in the police, (those who are entrusted with the coercive power of the state) to depict them being moved by a child’s art to stop committing violence. This means that she is showing that police are human, and have shared humanity with the dancing child, not that she believes police are bad.2) I also interpret this as religious iconography, some of many such images in the Formation video. God told Joshua that the walls at Jericho would fall when the priests surrounded it, making music by blowing trumpets. This is similar to art overcoming violence, or would be, if the army did not immediately flood Jericho and kill everyone when the walls came down. In fact, the only inhabitants of Jericho that were saved were the ones who had sheltered Joshua’s spies and made the attack possible. They were the lowest of the low, a prostitute and her family. Here, a Black child is depicted with his hoodie up doing a stereotypically Black activity: breakdancing. This imagery codes him as “worthless” in America: he/she is Black, he’she is in the street in New Orleans so poor; he/she is a “thug” in a hoodie; he/she is breakdancing thereby exhibiting Black culture. All of these aspects make this child, like Rahab in Joshua’s story, a “low” person in society. This child manages to achieve a surrender by a “wall” of police, evoking the priests in the book of Joshua who made the wall come tumbling down. -- source link