Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles-Lawson, has opened up about a past experience where a white woman criticised her for “allowing” her daughter to marry Jay-Z.
Speaking on CBS Mornings on February 10, Ms Knowles-Lawson, 68, recalled a conversation with an older white woman about her child.
"I can remember getting on a plane, and an older white woman saying, ‘Oh, your son is a gangster rapper, right? How did you let him marry your daughter?’” she said, referencing her son-in-law, Jay-Z, who married Beyoncé back in 2008. The couple also has three children: Blue Ivy, 10, and twins Rumi and Sir, four.
When responding to this white woman, Ms Knowles-Lawson noted how she was very caught off guard by her comment.
“It was just shocking to me and I said, ‘No, actually, my son is a CEO,’’ she explained. “She didn’t think of him as a CEO, or even a talented celebrity that was a great businessman.”
“At that time, I remember thinking, ‘I can’t be mad at her, because that is what the media portrays,’” the fashion designer added.
However, Ms Knowles-Lawson said that due to the fact that Black men have been stereotyped as “Gangster rappers” in the media, this could be why that white woman made this remark about Jay-Z.
“I sat there and I thought about how the media portrays Black men and how that is typical of the things that they would focus on, the negatives,” Knowles-Lawson said. “[They] try to portray us as these dangerous, our men as dangerous, uneducated. Gangster rapper, that’s all she could come up with, but that’s what she had been seeing on TV and all in the media. That’s how we’re portrayed, unfortunately.”
And as the executive producer of a new four-part docuseries, Profile: The Black Man, Ms Knowles-Lawson’s goal behind this project is “to debunk those stereotypes that [Black]” men are dangerous.
“How many times has a Black man walked into an elevator and someone clutches their purse? Or they walk by a car and the doors get locked?” she asked. “They could be a judge, they have no idea, but because it’s a Black man, especially if they’re of some stature, [they think] that they’re dangerous.”
“If we can kind of get people to understand that that’s not so, and show them examples of otherwise - that we do have good fathers, we are good providers, our men love their own women as well,” she added. “It’s just all the negative stereotypes. It’s perpetuated over and over no matter what.”
