Since Oct. 7, 2023, every minute detail of my world has been cracked entirely open, forcing me to question each element of the life I was living and the life I thought I wanted to live. I didn't, however, anticipate that I would be thinking of Beyoncé so much.
Photos of hospital bombs, flour massacres, and children's limbs have been circulating alongside memes since the onset of Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023—and much has shifted for me. We're more than a year into the intensified aggression in Gaza and the escalation of genocide against the people of Palestine by the Zionist entity, so-called Israel. Many of the Palestinian people I follow on Twitter (X) say this escalation of the Zionist occupation's ethnic cleansing is "worse than the Nakba," the catastrophe in 1948 when Zionist militias ethnically cleansed at least 750,000 Palestinians, killing about 15,000.
Before Al-Aqsa Flood, Beyoncé's music was in heavy rotation in my Spotify library. I went to the Renaissance tour in summer 2023 with my best friend, and I loved it. Beyoncé makes music that's fun to dance to, and I enjoy dancing—even though I despise the very existence of the billionaire class that includes her husband and that she sits in such close proximity to. Capitalism breeds contradictions.
Months after the Zionist occupation's declaration of genocidal intent, Beyoncé released Renaissance: The Film and screened it in Israel despite outcry from her fans, perhaps even goading us with the line from the film's closing song "My House": "Renaissance, new revolution." Videos flooded the internet of Zionists waving their homicidal flag and dancing to "Break My Soul" in their movie theaters. In many ways—especially since it was sung alongside the Israeli war chant "Yam Israel Chai"—"Break My Soul" went on to become a war anthem in a war against children without so much as an acknowledgement from the song's author.
I haven't returned Bey's music to my rotation since.
In the meantime, Beyoncé dropped her latest album, Cowboy Carter, a body of work that insists on her proud identity as an "American" while the country's tax dollars go directly toward homicidal entities. Her "Chitlin Circuit" tour for the album began at the end of April 2025, where she performed The Star-Spangled Banner and peddled Americana merch.
Through it all, her fans find new ways to insist that the art and the artist both are beyond even the suggestion of a critique. Across social media platforms, there is a whining insistence that Black people should be free to identify with the American National Project—we built this country that commits genocide in the satellite and internal colony alike, didn't we? What is happening in Palestine is the ending of a world, and I am reconfiguring all elements of my world in an act of witness. This includes how I want to conceptualize Celebrity, and the ways that those closest to me interact with it. The offering presented today is not only about Beyoncé, but also to consider how Celebrity is being used to manufacture consent for this genocide.
Inside of me, there is regret and resentment for any part of a life spent where my baseline contentment was predicated on someone else's extreme suffering. As others celebrated the release of Cowboy Carter and marked the announcement of the tour by spending a month's rent on a ticket, I recalled that what we as American consumers love and enjoy is made possible by suffering that many of us could never fathom. The tour launch, which is decidedly Americana, coincides with the one year anniversary of the college campus encampments. Genocide continues globally, ICE is openly black bagging political dissidents and immigrants alike, we have no new tactics, and life moves on at the heart of empire.
As bombs fall on Gaza, as the UN orchestrates the occupation of Haiti, as Sudan and Congo resist their own genocides, as the Sahel reaches for liberation, as youth in Myanmar take up arms, I hope every facet of life in the United States is disrupted. May we never know peace for all our complicity, even the passive kind.
What is happening in Palestine is the ending of a world, and I am reconfiguring all elements of my world in an act of witness.
Amid several ongoing genocides, celebrities cannot—and should not—be trusted to offer insightful theorizing about the ends of our worlds. But Beyoncé, who's been known to co-opt revolutionary language and imagery in her projects, has chosen complicity by way of silence, normalization, and crossing the cultural boycott. It has felt outright bizarre to me that any output from Beyoncé Knowles Carter is still seen as legitimate and worthy of our attention after she allowed her film to be screened for Zionists and failed to speak up about them using her song as a war anthem. The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reported the death toll as of April 20, 2025 in Gaza is 51,305 people, including at least 17,400 children., Countless others are buried under rubble. A study from July 2024 examining "indirect deaths" from disease, destroyed health-care infrastructure, and food and water shortages calculated that "such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths."
Long before this though, Beyoncé, like most celebrities, solidified that she is aligned not with her fans, but with her class interests. Because of the nature of our media landscape and the warping, insidious nature of Celebrity, it is easy for us to imagine closer proximity to these people than we actually have. When celebrities like Beyoncé do things like establish scholarship funds, or selectively share intimate details of their lives with us, it makes us feel like we know them through these parasocial relationships.
As part of our praxis and commitment to a new world, my friends and community have been working through what it would look like to divest from Celebrity. Celebrity Culture encourages us to give wealthy artists not only our attention and praise, but also our funds and influence over our lives. The parasocial relationship is hardly an even exchange, in part because in return, their wealth and recognition firmly situates them within the imperial hierarchy.
In choosing divestment, I am looking for ways to re-route the mental and material resources that go towards making people who are not aligned with us rich and revered. Part of me wonders if it's actually possible to fully divest when this country is so reliant on Celebrity; mass reverence shortens our memory. It doesn't make the effort any less worthwhile, or urgent. Abolitionists like myself struggle with a similar tension: police and prisons operate even as we work to destroy them. I don't fight because victory is assured, I struggle because it is what we must do.
There is a shifting that should happen within each of us in the belly of an apocalypse—and genocides are apocalyptic. There is nothing a billionaire can serenade to me to assuage me in metabolizing an apocalypse every structural element of this society is accountable for.
There is an entire media-cultural apparatus dedicated to making sure we are always wanting to know the celebrities in our world. And that is dangerous because in the midst of our adoration—and, to some extent, obsession—we have built Beyoncé and her peers into infallible figures who many refuse to critique.
The nature of Celebrity Culture today is such that we do not simply enjoy our stars for their music and their fashion; we swear fealty to them, projecting morals and ethics onto them (and oftentimes genius) that they have not proven to hold. It's in this feverish deifying that we shadow their capacity, and truly their enthusiasm, to be complicit in real harm as they maintain their popularity and riches.
When Kamala Harris entered the 2024 presidential race, the former vice president selected Beyoncé's "Freedom" as the campaign song. Beyoncé made a rare political speech at a Houston rally for Kamala Harris' presidential bid in October, and said: "I'm not here as a celebrity, I'm not here as a politician. I'm here as a mother." Still, she made no mention of the genocide in Palestine, a tragedy marked by reproductive injustice and family separation.
Despite Beyoncé's attempt to step outside of her Celebrity status to talk shop with us, there is no separating the art from an artist here, especially an artist who feigns ushering in a revolution as Palestinians shed blood for one.
Taylor Swift tried the same "I'm just like you" approach when she endorsed Harris for president via Instagram. As quickly as her "childless cat lady" post garnered more than 11 million likes and counting, fans seemed to forget about certain important truths. About her rumored ex-boyfriend, Matty Healy, who's been accused of being a neo-Nazi. About her incessant, planet-cooking private jet usage. About her political silence which she only broke two years into the Trump presidency.
Post-campaign, SEC filings show that the debt-laden Harris-Walz campaign blew the record-breaking billion dollars it raised in just over 100 days, not only far outspending Trump in the same timeframe, but funneling cash to other Celebrity billionaires. Oprah Winfrey, who spoke at the Unite for America rally in October, received $1 million to her production company from the campaign. Winfrey now says the funds were for production costs and not her endorsement. Claims circulated about the campaign not paying its staffers their final check, as it closed out $20 million in debt—which is also what the campaign spent on celebrity appearances in battleground states. Several months after the election, the Harris-Walz campaign is still sending Obama-Era subject line emails that basically read as: donate now, or else.
There is a shifting that should happen within each of us in the belly of an apocalypse—and genocides are apocalyptic.
This is how the construct of Celebrity employs distraction and props up the empire. These moments when they step up for us, on the campaign trail or bedecked in radical garb—"for democracy," so to speak—eclipses the reality that celebrities are our class antagonists. When Beyoncé used her platform to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, it obscured the fact that for over a year of genocide—a genocide that she is complicit in, a genocide that has already impacted many of her vulnerable fans in the U.S.—she was silent.
Ultimately, Beyoncé is doing what she does best, what Celebrity encourages—which is to use her art to show us something about ourselves that we otherwise would not have confronted. In this particular case, it may be that Beyoncé is showing us what many have refused to hear from Palestinians: that given the opportunity to disrupt any level of our personal comfort or entertainment, even in the face of incomprehensible human cruelty, we would rather continue dancing.