<img src="http://madamenoire.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/image-awards-feat.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-785617 aligncenter" width="883" height="516" />
Beyoncé won an award for Best Urban Contemporary Album at this year's Grammy ceremony and this is what she had to say (as transcribed by <a href="http://time.com/4668482/grammys-2017-beyonce-speech/"><em>Time Magazine</em>)</a>:
<blockquote><em>“Thank you to the Grammy voters for this incredible honor. Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to beautifully capture the profundity of deep Southern culture. I thank God for my family, my wonderful husband, my beautiful daughter, my fans for bringing me so much happiness and support. We all experience pain and loss, and often we become inaudible. My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history. To confront issues that make us uncomfortable. It's important to me to show images to my children that reflect their beauty so they can grow up in a world where they look in the mirror — first through their own families, as well as the news, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the White House and the Grammys — and see themselves. And have no doubt that they're beautiful, intelligent and capable. This is something I want for every child of every race, and I feel it's vital that we learn from the past and recognize our tendencies to repeat our mistakes."</em></blockquote>
Beyoncé won three awards at this year's NAACP Image Awards and this is what she had to say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E_zMLCRNg
That's right: she said crickets.
Why?
Well because she wasn't at the 48<sup>th</sup> annual gala.
Just like many other Black artists weren't there.
And it is not really a surprise. The longest running joke about the NAACP Image Awards (among other award shows that honor Blacks in excellence) is that the only folks who go to those award shows are the ones accepting awards on other people's behaves.
And really this is not about Beyoncé. We know she is pregnant with twins and can't be performing all over the place. But it makes you wonder why she, among so many others, choose more mainstream and predominately White platforms to make grand statements about the importance of honoring our image, when we have perfectly good platforms of our own, waiting to be cultivated.
This is especially important considering the backlash against the #OscarSoWhite campaign from a few years back. As I recall, it was many of our own who hissed at and objected to <a href="http://madamenoire.com/609298/why-jada-pinkett-smiths-oscar-boycott-is-corny-but-needed/">Jada Pinkett-Smith's call for a boycott at the 2016 Academy Awards.</a>
We were the ones telling her and other disgruntled artists to stop complaining; stop seeking validation and instead, build our own.
One of those folks was Janet Hubert, former mom (the first one) on the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" who said:
<blockquote>“Here’s what I believe: The Academy has the right to acknowledge whomever they choose. To invite whomever they choose. And now I think that it is our responsibility now to make the change. Maybe it is time that we pull back our resources and we put them back into our communities, into our programs, and we make programs for ourselves that acknowledge us in ways that we see fit. That are just as good as the so-called ‘mainstream ones.’ I don’t know.”</blockquote>
As <a href="http://madamenoire.com/609298/why-jada-pinkett-smiths-oscar-boycott-is-corny-but-needed/"><i>short-sighted and dismissive as I personally felt</i> </a>Hubert's tone was (like, who advocates against not showing up?), I agreed with the bulk of what she had to say about the need to support our own. So did many others. And for a whole year, folks big and small pledged to do better by us, for us.
But here we are in the era of our Lord Donald Trump. And folks are still watching, tweeting and complaining about racism at the Grammys. And meanwhile, at the NAACP Awards, Anthony Anderson accepts an award on behalf of the <i>Oshun “</i>who couldn't be here with us tonight...”
Granted our spaces are just as problematic. The classism and insistence on petite respectability. The sexism and homophobia. The cheap set designs and shoddy editing.
But somewhere along the line, we have decided it's much more gratifying – financial and otherwise - to struggle for inclusion into those spaces instead of struggling to fix and support our own.
And somewhere along the line, we decided to use what should be viewed as sage wisdom (i.e. “Build Your Own”) as a way to malign and shut down folks who rightly point out how the spaces we are supporting, invested in and trying to be included in, are toxic as hell.
Somewhere along the line, we have confused the mental gymnastics we are playing on ourselves as “The Work” we should actually be doing to build ourselves up.
What is the point in our folks building platforms for us and our images, if we, The People, can't even be bothered to show up and support?
<em>Image via WENN</em>
<i>Charing Ball is a writer, cultural critic and smarty-pants Black feminist from Philadelphia. To learn more, visit<a href="https://nineteenseventy-seven.com/"> NineteenSeventy-Seven.com</a>.</i>
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