Have you ever had an experience when you were invited to a space, only to discover you were clearly not wanted?
Lord knows I have been, more times than I could anticipate or count. Each time, the indignity doesn’t lessen; but I increasingly learn how to emerge from those moments unscathed, stronger, and brighter, in hopes of leaving those places better than when I arrived.
Well, continuing her era of turning lemons into lemonade, Beyoncé’s new album, “Cowboy Carter,” seeks to demonstrate how she’s processed similar experiences. According to Beyoncé, her new album “was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t.” Many have presumed the experience in question was the very public moment she was invited to perform “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards (CMAs) — a moment during which she chose former industry darlings The Dixie Chicks (now simply known as “The Chicks”) to join her onstage — only to find she was an unwanted presence.
“Some were outraged that Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks, who have been estranged from the country music community, were allowed to perform at the 2016 CMA Awards,” Gerren Keith Gaynor reported for theGrio at the time. Subsequently, angry country music fans forced the CMA to remove all traces of Beyoncé from its online recaps in an astonishing gesture that amounted to erasure. While some speculated that political differences between Beyoncé, The Dixie Chicks and the core CMA fan base led to the removal of her performance from their platform, such an effacement of dissenting voices remains unprecedented in the entertainment industry. As a further insult, despite her erasure on its website and social media, the CMAs still promoted a free download of the performance, in truly exploitative fashion.
Instead of focusing on the anti-Black commentary and reception Beyoncé experienced in…
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