Beyoncé is coupling her album, Cowboy Carter, with Americana-themed images. She straddles a white horse and holds the US flag in the album’s cover art. In other photos, the flag is everything, everywhere, all at once – capes, boots, bomber jackets with leather frills, durags, sashes, scarves and hair beads. Unlike white artists who drape themselves in red, white and blue, Mrs Carter becomes a billionaire cultural astronaut, and drives the flag pole down into the ground as a stake for Black America. Capitalists will claim the territory. Levi’s stock jumped 20% the week after Beyoncé dropped its name on the album (the US denim brand is mostly made in China, India and Bangladesh). US flag apparel manufacturers might hope that the Cowboy Carter tour will do for them what Renaissance did for silvers and sequins.
The timing is terrible. The timing is always terrible to be a voluntary brand ambassador for the United States, intended or not. Economic inequality is increasing. Black people overwhelmingly experience the most hate crimes, which have soared by nearly 50% since 2019. The nation is always at war. Currently, Congress is Israel’s personal Instacart for bombs against Palestinians trapped in Gaza. Yet is it possible for Cowboy Carter fans to separate Beyoncé’s pride in being a Black American woman, a southerner and Texan, from what the US has historically done, and is doing right now?
Black people whose ancestors were enslaved in the US have important contributions and strange inheritances. Beyoncé is right about country music. Black people were foundational to the creation of the genre. What is true for country music is true for the country, too. Black people built the United States with their labor and ideas, and actualized any semblance of democracy here through their pursuits to be included as citizens. As such, the United States not only owes Black people reparations, but also the elimination of any unjust system that will rob them from the benefits of the repair.
People can be susceptible to feeling entitled to what they have been denied, whether that’s recognition for musical genius or the desire to be viewed as an “American”. Notwithstanding the Olympics, the US denies Black people full civic and social citizenship. Black people may fight for rights and land, join the military, seek office, demand awards, secure the bag, secure multiple bags, and whatever else it takes for representation. After all, what are the other options? Where else will we go? The pervasive idea that “Black people built America” and are therefore entitled to its flag, pride and positions of power can miss that much of what this country is and does is poisonous.
The masses of Black people who built this country did not want to build this country. They did so under the threat of the whip, rope and gun. The stars and stripes that Beyoncé wears today did not fly in their favor. The US flag represented slavery much earlier and for much longer than the Confederate flag, yet the latter launders the sinful stains of the former. If the Confederacy had won, and Black people eventually secured their freedom, would we wear that flag because our ancestors built that country, too? If so, it is because we force flags to adopt the views of the hands that hold them.
Additionally, many of our enslaved ancestors who built the US also refused and rejected it. Some sought to destroy it. Ten to fifteen thousand more enslaved people fled to fight for the British than for George Washington because the former promised freedom. Africans and their descendants did not gain power or liberation by working to build the United States, but when they stopped doing so. Their planned and spontaneous runaways, rebellions and uprisings created the conditions to end slavery. Black people joined First Nations tribes, crossed borders into Mexico and built self-sustaining maroon communities in the swamps.
Black people who remained on plantations feigned sickness to avoid labor, sabotaged their work tools and conditions, stole their time back by taking long routes running errands, and secretly sold and bartered goods to skim their owners’ profits. In Black Reconstruction, WEB DuBois writes that organized, mass general strikes on plantations delivered major blows to slavery because it rendered plantations powerless while men were away fighting, and demonstrated that Black people mostly had to depend on themselves for freedom. In his chapter on the General Strike, he quotes the popular saying amongst the Union northerners, “To the flag we are pledged, all its foes we abhor, And we ain’t for the n-----, but we are for the war.”
This theme recurs throughout history: through boycotts, sick outs, massive labor marches, and more, organized and spontaneous Black rejection of the American project is an integral part of freedom fighting. There is no flag to claim, let alone reclaim.
As much as Beyoncé’s fans could wear star-spangled outfits at day parties this summer because their ancestors built the US, they could just as easily burn all of them if they choose to honor different ancestors. It is a choice. Hopefully, we are not so desperately flagless that we are willing to cling to an empire that is killing us, and many others around the world, for aesthetic pride. What gives Black culture beauty is its connection to the African diaspora, as evidenced through the banjo, the African instrument that made the country sound possible; what gives Black culture in the US its power is how it grows against the conditions of the country. At the end of the Black national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, James Weldon Johnson reminds us to stay “true to our native land”.
Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist
