Jay Z and Beyonce are one amazing couple. Having been married for eight years now, their marriage has gone through some trying times, but still seems to be going strong. With the influence that they wield in the entertainment industry, they have been vocal on numerous issues affecting America and the world as a whole. And this year, Jay Z and Beyonce have done a lot to bring to light the suffering experienced by the black population in relation to police brutality.
This was especially following the killing of African American men by police in Minnesota, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and other parts of the country in the month of July. In the Minnesota case, Governor Mark Dayton blamed the killing on racial bias among the police in the region, stating that the officer who killed Philando Castile used unnecessarily excessive force on the victim. He also pointed out that the state had to come to terms with the racism problem. The following was his exact statement as reported by the Guardian .
“Would this have happened if the driver and passenger were white? I don’t think it would have. So I’m forced to confront, and I think all of Minnesota is forced to confront, that this kind of racism exists.”
That said, Jay Z chose to address the issue in a different way, and that was through music. He released a song titled “Spiritual” that featured beats by Detail that spoke about this. It highlighted the problem of police brutality as experienced by the black population. The following are some of the lyrics on the track related to this.
“I am not poison / Just a boy from the hood that got my hands in the air / In despair don’t shoot / I just wanna do good.
“… This is the real me unfold / Gangster is love, I’m thuggin’, I’m huggin’ / This is tougher than any gun that I raised / Any crack that I blazed, that was nothin’ / Peeling back the layers, uncovering / Scars that never healed, I never kept it this real.”
This is as reported by Rolling Stone . On her part, Beyonce honored victims of racial killings during her Glasgow concert by asking for a moment of silence. Two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had been shot dead in the previous week, the former, while pinned on the ground by law enforcement officers outside a convenience store, and the latter while reaching for his wallet in a traffic stop. Footage of their shootings was widely shared on social media. Beyonce also wrote the following about the racism problem on her site .
“We are sick and tired of the killings of young men and women in our communities. It is up to us to take a stand and demand that they ‘stop killing us.’ We don’t need sympathy. We need everyone to respect our lives.”
Now, however, Beyonce is being accused of using the race card to get out of a situation. According to Eurweb , Matthew Fulks, who is suing the Lemonade singer for adapting parts of his film “Palinoia,” recently told the court that she was trying to distract it from the main issue, which is plagiarism and turning it into racism.
This was after Beyonce highlighted that the two pieces of work were very different in that his film was about a depressed white man going through a hard time after a failed relationship, while Lemonade was about “an African-American woman who progresses through stages of suspicion, denial, anger and, ultimately, reconciliation in her relationship.” This is as reported by TMZ . Fulks supposedly made the claim against Beyonce, Jay Z’s wife, on August 10.
[Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images]