5 Things to Consider When Thinking About Beyoncé’s Buffalo Soldier T-Shirt

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

Image: beyonce.com

 
 

My hold on philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s 2022 book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) came in this week and it couldn’t have been better timing. The book is about how identity politics have been co-opted through something called elite capture, a phenomenon where “political projects can be hijacked—in principle or in effect—by the well positioned and better resourced,” as Táíwò explains. Or, put another way, elite capture describes how the most powerful and privileged people tend to take over activist spaces, reshaping conversations, policies and action to serve their own interests.

This is definitely something I’m still learning about (I’m only halfway through the book, tbh) but it felt relevant this week because my timeline definitely exploded over the Paris stop of the Cowboy Carter tour. Or more specifically, over a t-shirt Beyoncé wore to celebrate the Buffalo Soldiers, a nickname given to all-Black army regiments that were formed in 1866, largely to “to support the nation's westward expansion by protecting settlers, building roads and other infrastructure, and guarding the U.S. mail,” according to the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

‘The nation’s westward expansion’ sounds pretty innocuous, right? But what it really means is, these regiments—largely composed of formerly enslaved men—were deployed to support the American government’s genocidal ambitions, contributing to the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous nations throughout what is now the American West and along the U.S.-Mexico border. With that context in mind, consider Bey’s shirt, which apparently included a long passage on the back that called the Buffalo Soldiers’ antagonists, a.k.a. the Indigenous people who were fighting for their own land, “the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries.” (I say apparently only because the sole official shot I could find of the back of the shirt was impossible to read. That being said, it does look just like the text shown in the fan-posted photo that went viral this week.)

In short: oooooof.

Or, the slightly longer version: If I were Beyoncé, I probably would not have tried to flatten a complicated part of American, and specifically Black American history, into a simple patriotic fable, but since she did, let’s talk about some things. Read on for five thoughts about elite capture, celebrity worship and, yes, fandom.

1. This is a good opportunity to actually learn about the Buffalo Soldiers

I don’t doubt that Beyoncé’s motivation for creating this shirt was a genuine desire to highlight Black American history—that goal has been the underpinning of the entire Cowboy Carter era. But it is definitely also true that she is doing so through the lens of patriotism, which is… complicated. I admit that I am generally suspicious of patriotism, but even if you aren’t necessarily of the borders-aren’t-real persuasion, I think it’s clear that unabashed enthusiasm for nation-states can very easily veer into pro-genocide pandering to imperialism, as it did here. In this sanitized version of history, the American Indian Wars and the Mexican-American Wars were objectively ‘good’ and the Black soldiers who contributed to the ‘making of America’ through fighting off ‘the enemy’ were heroic, if under-represented in history books. But absolutely no one should be surprised to hear that this leaves a lot of things out.

Yes, I mean the fact that their duties in the American West were part of the U.S. government’s strategic, organized, targeted extermination of Native American people, cultures and languages. (A genocide that is ongoing, btw, and also happening in Canada.) But also, this kind of mythologizing inadvertently downplays the anti-Blackness the Buffalo Soldiers faced throughout their tenures. The shirt does mention discrimination, and how often their military contributions were ignored, but doesn’t go into detail. So: they were horribly mistreated by other (read: white) members of the U.S. Army and the settlers they had been ordered to protect. They were excluded from the segregated towns where they were stationed, often harassed and beaten by settlers, sometimes harassed by law officials—and in some cases murdered. Though they had the lowest rates of desertion and court-martials of all Army regiments, their white commanders used them as cannon fodder, and, in the case of 110 Buffalo Soldiers, were even unfairly convicted of mutiny and other crimes, a wrong that was only corrected in 2023. I know that’s probably a bit much to put on a t-shirt, but there had to be a way to tell this story with more nuance than ‘let’s celebrate inclusion, even if that means the seat you’re earning is at a genocidal, war-mongering table!’

On a related note, military historian Frank Schubert, whose work has focused on Black military history for decades, wrote about how Buffalo Soldiers exist in the American cultural imagination in 2009, and it was interesting to see him debunk some of the mystique around these regiments. For example, the story that Native American warriors bestowed the nickname Buffalo Soldiers on them as a sign of respect for their “fierce fighting abilities” is actually not grounded in fact. There’s no documentation or proof that this was the origin of the nickname, and in fact, this explanation can be traced to cautious speculation by historian William H. Leckie in his 1967 book, The Buffalo Soldiers. What’s more, “the most serious objection has come from contemporary Native American leaders, who were angered over the publicity attending the issue of a buffalo-soldier postage stamp in 1994 and resented the suggestion that there was some special bond between the soldiers and their warrior ancestors,” Schubert notes.

Interestingly, he also takes aim at the idea that the history of the Buffalo Soldiers has been untold, and asks what that myth can tell us about ourselves, writing, “Why, in the absence of data, or even despite the contrary evidence, has the myth taken hold? What needs does it meet? How much of the myth is a multi-cultural [sic] fantasy, an attempt to see the past through a present-day prism?” One thing it brings up for me: the Magical Negro, Noble Savage and Mystical Minority tropes, which confers otherworldly or superhuman powers on people who belong to non-dominant cultures. Even though the traits being assigned to both the Buffalo Soldiers and the Native warriors are ostensibly positive, the impact is dehumanizing. We end up talking about these people not as people, but almost as magnificent predators who are worthy of respect, but lack the human need for compassion or care.

2. Turns out, oppression is intersectional, too

Schubert’s idea of a multicultural fantasy feels related to another issue that’s at play here: the fantasy of the simple narrative. The internet’s reaction to Bey’s t-shirt illuminates something that I think is really difficult for people to integrate into their understanding of the world: you can be subjugated and participate in the subjugation of others. At the same time, even! For example, there’s about 150 years of American history where Native Americans and Black people were enslaved in tandem, per historian Tiya Miles. Even more complicated, these two groups of people were not just experiencing oppression from a white colonial state; they would, at various times, also oppress one another.

This is actually an extremely common tactic for colonial forces. As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explained in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, “This reality strikes many as tragic, as if oppressed former slaves and Indigenous peoples being subjected to genocidal warfare should magically be unified against their common enemy, ‘the white man.’ In fact, this is precisely how colonialism in general and colonial warfare in particular work. It is not unique to the United States, but rather a part of the tradition of European colonialism since the Roman legions. The British organized whole armies of ethnic troops in South and Southwestern Asia, the most famous being the Gurkhas from Nepal, who fought as recently as Margaret Thatcher's war against Argentina in 1983.”

But prior to the abolition of slavery, some Native American nations also enslaved Black people. It’s well-established that five so-called “Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole—"were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black [sic] codes, immediately re-established slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War,” according to Smithsonian curator Paul Chaat Smith, who oversaw the design of an exhibit exploring this difficult historical truth that ran from 2018 to 2022 at the National Museum of the American Indian.

When Beyoncé’s fans brought this history up, it was to excuse the Buffalo Soldier’s participation in the state’s goal of eradicating Native Americans. But there are currently 574 federally recognized Native American tribes, and there would have been even more nations in the late 1800s. So, does the behaviour of five of those tribes justify the eradication of all Indigenous people? Does anything justify the eradication of an entire people? This is all rhetorical, obviously. Nothing justifies the eradication of an entire people. But it does lead us to legitimately thorny questions that I personally don’t have the answers to. Like, how do we navigate historical harms so that there is accountability without devolving into tit-for-tat revenge fantasies? What does it require of us to meaningfully hold space for one another’s generational trauma? And how do we account for the lingering effects of colonization and slavery, while also acknowledging that they may impact our communities differently?

3. I do need the stans to cool it for a minute, though

I’m kind of over writing about celebrity stan culture, partially because it’s been done to death and partially because it often teeters into misogyny, as if only young women behave irrationally over their favourite celebrity. But I do think it’s worth bringing up this time, because I keep seeing people’s deep resistance to the very idea that Beyoncé could be imperfect manifest into anti-Indigenous sentiment. And… everyone knows we don’t have to do that, right? We can, in fact, like an artist and still not accept or agree with everything they do.

Only, I actually think everyone might not know that? Or at least, it might genuinely be difficult for people to detach from their celebrity worship enough to think critically about their fave’s behaviour. And that’s not because they’re unhinged stans or that something is wrong with them—it’s because the world has actually been reorganized, and fandom is now the default framework for interacting with not just celebrities, but also politicians, businesses and even one another. I’m still thinking this one through, so don’t quote me on any of this yet, but I do think there is social pressure to signal your belonging in a particular group through consistent, ever-lasting co-signs. (Which, considering how uncertain and scary the world is, probably offers some personal comfort, too.) The problem is, this leads to actual bonkers opinions, like the person who tweeted that they care more about Beyoncé than genocide, which… what the actual fuck?

I mean… I like Beyoncé’s music. I think she’s a generational talent. I have paid obscene amounts of money to see her in concert (though I do want to note that this is also because of Ticketmaster’s monopoly, so perhaps not a perfect metric of my devotion). But does relying on the run of “Move” to “All Up In Your Mind” as hype music mean I have to like everything she says and does until one or both of us dies?! Because that feels like a lot.

4. The sociological concept of elite capture applies here for sure

I have written about how both Beyoncé and Jay-Z perform progressiveness while also navigating the demands of capitalism before, but I’m bringing it up again because a) it’s still relevant and b) I have a new vocabulary word that helps explain their positionality: Elite capture. According to Táíwò, the term actually originated in another context: “the study of developing countries to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over financial benefits, especially foreign aid, meant for others.” But it is also a useful way to understand how social movements can be co-opted. In fact, he says, this is exactly “what happens when the advantaged few in a group steer the resources and political direction of organizations or movements or parts of our social structure like the justice system toward their narrower interests and aims.” 

We saw this in a really obvious way when Jay-Z partnered with the NFL and suddenly changed his tone when speaking about Colin Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter, but I’d argue that Beyoncé’s body of work functions in a similar way, using the aesthetics of political radicalism to simultaneously communicate a creative and artistic idea, push back against problematic narratives around Blackness and especially Black womanhood, sell albums—and, unfortunately, uphold a deeply oppressive political structure. Whatever Beyoncé the human being believes, Beyoncé the brand is less focused on collective liberation and more focused on accumulating economic, political and social power within our existing system.

Consider bell hooks’ 2016 review of Lemonade, which argues that the politic of that album was not truly liberatory. “In the world of fantasy feminism, there are no class, sex and race hierarchies that break down simplified categories of women and men, no call to challenge and change systems of domination, no emphasis on intersectionality. In such a simplified worldview, women gaining the freedom to be like men can be seen as powerful. But it is a false construction of power as so many men, especially Black men, do not possess actual power… Ultimately Lemonade glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction. It does not resolve.”

And that lack of resolution is kind of the point, I think. Beyoncé occupies a rarefied space. She has accumulated the money, influence and respect necessary to shape the world, or at least her world, as she sees fit. This doesn’t just allow her to buy into the idea that it’s possible to achieve true liberation within a deeply unjust system (which… it is not), it also incentivizes her to sell that idea back to her fans. Which is not inherently bad! See above, re: hype music. But while I’ve always thought that celebrity engagement with political ideas tends to be a net positive because it introduces these topics to audiences who might never have come across them on their own, I’m increasingly wary of how these conversations happen between stars and their fans, or even just around these public figures. Inevitably, the ideas become simplified, subverted—or, worst case, harnessed to uphold the very structures they’re meant to dismantle.

5. Also this is absolutely not the point of this article but: babe, put the ChatGPT down!!! See what trouble it gets you into?!

Also… literally, who wrote this? And did anyone read it? Because it seems like it was an AI assemblage, since several of those paragraphs appear in William H. Leckie’s 1967 book about the Buffalo Soldiers. And that? Is a level of carelessness and a lack of foresight that I genuinely find surprising from an artist with Beyoncé’s reputation for rigour and meticulousness.

✨ Introducing The Issues Studio! ✨

A non-Friday Things announcement! As I mentioned earlier this month, I’m transitioning back to freelancing, and I’m so thrilled to tell you about a really exciting project: The Issues Studio, a new creative agency that produces smart, beautiful print products. I’m teaming up with art director Nicola Hamilton and photo director Jalani Morgan to help brands, organizations and people tell their stories through magazines, newspapers and other print products. If that’s something you’re excited about, too, please do reach out: hello@issuesmagshop.com. We’d love to work with you! (And, you can also email me directly for non-print consulting on editorial strategy and brand building, as well as speaking, writing and editing. I’m at stacy@fridaythings.com.)

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Culture, PoliticsStacy Lee KongBeyonce, Jay Z, Cowboy Carter