POLITICS OF RESENTMENT
IN AN ESSAY CALLED “KILLING RAGE: MILITANT RESISTANCE,” bell hooks confesses the longing to kill an anonymous white man sitting next to her on an airplane. “I felt a ‘killing rage,’” she says. “I wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my purse.” hooks was traveling with a friend, another Black woman, who was denied her correct seat next to hooks in first class because the airline printed the wrong boarding pass. The friend was called out over the loudspeaker and humiliated, though she had made no mistake—the error was theirs. A white man took the seat next to hooks while her friend was forced to sit in coach. The rage that bubbles up and explodes in hooks as she sits and writes on the plane is not just tied to that one incident, though; it’s the culmination of a lifetime of experiencing and viewing microaggressions against Black women, seemingly minor everyday occurrences that reinforce a racist and sexist system in which white men constantly reap privileges for no other reason than that they were born white men. She doesn’t literally want to kill the man. Her rage is directed at the system that created the situation and reinforces the white man’s actions as normal and acceptable time and again.
“By demanding that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress, and exploit,” hooks explains. With no viable outlet to express her rage and frustration, she ends up weeping. Asking students to meditate on hooks’s essay holds up rage as another critical force, and allows them to connect hooks’s ordinary experience on that plane with other examples from the news and their lives every day. It forces students to reflect on individual reactions to the rage hooks expresses, and any possible complicity with what the white man in “Killing Rage” represents. To see the ways that all interactions carry histories with them, even when individual people’s everyday interactions may seem immediately removed from those histories. hooks’s rage isn’t trivial or irrational—it’s illuminating. It draws attention to the small choices everyone makes daily that hold power to exacerbate or alleviate rage and subsequent despair for hooks and others.
Though Black women’s rage is often stereotyped as superfluous in order to hide its sociopolitical import, Carol Anderson explores how the exact opposite is true for white people, particularly white men. In her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, she succinctly explains how white rage and resentment have been the constitutive discriminatory forces in United States politics, legislation, and imagination. Despite the appearance of progress over time—more legal protections, antidiscrimination statutes, some technical equality under the law—the underlying racism and interlocking oppressions of the nation weren’t eradicated, just more cleverly disguised. They still bubble up regularly, as hooks’s experience on the plane makes clear. “With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling,” Anderson says. As a few large overarching race issues—the biggest flames—appeared to get extinguished (even if in name only) throughout history, white resentment and rage at Black people, and at the perceived loss of a fabricated privileged status, continued to seethe under the surface, find new expression even from within seemingly progressive reform. The 2016 election found that white rage undeniably come home to roost. Beyoncé is attuned to her own rage as well. And she may also be especially attuned to the kindling, which is why fires are never fully extinguished in her videos.
Beyoncé invokes rage and anger sparingly in her catalog, but they are there. The unmitigated rage of “Ring the Alarm” is an anchor to B’Day. Anger permeates much of the first half of Lemonade: the gleeful destruction she perpetrates along the street with a baseball bat in “Hold Up,” and her impassioned delivery of “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” Audre Lorde, like hooks, addresses the indispensability of anger in speaking back to power in her own essay, “The Uses of Anger.” Rather than questioning anger, she questions its absence: Why wouldn’t a Black woman be angry at the system? And following Lorde, why aren’t more people angry at the system’s treatment of Black women? Lorde says, “It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us, but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment,” and thus, an important way to critique power. Beyoncé has occasionally tapped that anger as a productive force, and as a position from which to swing a fist back at the oppressive systems and privileges that allow white people’s harmful actions to continue unchecked.
hooks’s rage, seen by society as irrational stereotype, devolves into tears for lack of modes to express that rage and be heard. White rage, on the other hand, is translated into discriminatory policies and strategies. Fighting fire with fire only goes so far, because rage is only seen as productive when wielded by certain people. Because rage from the oppressed becomes all-consuming, hooks ultimately argues, “[i]t must be tempered by an engagement with a full range of emotional responses to black struggle for self-determination”; that rage must be felt, harnessed as connective force, but also can’t exist in isolation. What does a tempered but still simmering rage look like? How can rage, wielded critically, counter oppression, create new possibility, and highlight various complicities all at once? Anderson’s writing shows how white rage created a resentment that has maintained the racist status quo for centuries. Beyoncé, too, highlights resentment as a basis that can guide politics to challenge that status quo, resentment from an alternative direction that gets truly heard and understood. Anger and rage explode, and explosions are often necessary. But resentment smolders.
Why Don’t You Love Bey?
Beyoncé first posed her infamous question, “Why don’t you love me?,” in 2008. The song was never officially released as a US single, but appeared on various deluxe versions of I Am … Sasha Fierce and a bonus tracks EP, not quite conceptually attached to either side of the album proper. The video, released in 2010, finds Beyoncé playing a new character altogether, B.B. Homemaker, introduced by name during 1950s-styled opening credits. Beyoncé has also translated the song into an impactful interactive live performance, notably part of both the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour during 2013 and 2014 and the On the Run Tour in the summer of 2014. Both video and performance highlight aspects of what a strategic resentment might look and feel like.
The question itself seems almost comical: After all, who doesn’t love Beyoncé? Sure, she has critics and naysayers like any artist, but even those same critics can’t completely discount Beyoncé’s work ethic, talent, and cultural impact. While playfully ironic on its surface, Beyoncé’s performance of the question reveals an anger, rage, and critique lurking underneath. Put another way, in a moment when Black lives are explicitly and uniformly devalued, especially in America—when Black women are de facto seen and devalued as angry simply for existing within a racist and sexist system—what does it mean for Beyoncé to ask, as a Black woman, hey, why don’t you love me? Perhaps she’s even alluding to the absurdity of the question by not including a question mark in the formal song title. The question isn’t about Beyoncé at all, but should be seen as political commentary uttered by a Black woman, like hooks’s “killing rage.” Besides, it’s not even Beyoncé asking; B.B. Homemaker is, which brings with it another host of associations. The question to which she repeatedly demands a satisfactory answer, is really: Why doesn’t the United States love Black women? It serves as a tweaked predecessor to the question actress Amandla Stenberg poses in her YouTube video, “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows”: “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?” The question is modified and posed again in Lemonade—in which Stenberg conspicuously appears—by Beyoncé as, “Why can’t you see me? Everyone else can.”
The video for “Why Don’t You Love Me” opens with the kind of bouncy, happy-go-lucky instrumental music associated with sitcoms from the 1950s, and all the regressive, stereotypical messages contained in them. A male radio announcer’s voice speaks the title of the song and introduces B.B. Homemaker, cementing this performance as more character-driven commentary. Her own forceful spoken intro follows. She speaks to her (presumably male) partner on the other side of a telephone she haphazardly swings to-andfro, warning him that she’s about to leave if he doesn’t make some drastic changes in behavior. He must have bumped his head, but B.B.’s there to talk some sense back into him. He hasn’t been treating her right and there’s no excuse for it—even all his friends recognize her worth. She’d hate for him to return to an empty house. A slightly passive-aggressive threat, followed by the demand that drives the entire song: “All I need to know is why …” and she begins singing, “Why don’t you love me?” She relates all this matter-of-factly, but with martini in hand and smoky eye shadow streaming down her face. Despite the setting and various allusions, B.B. Homemaker is certainly no stereotypical 1950s housewife.
The song is a point-by-point presentation, down to poster board and easel touting the titular question, refuting reasons one might give not to love her. Beyoncé as B.B. Homemaker is not only demanding an answer to the question, but demanding that audiences sit in the rhythms of “Why Don’t You Love Me,” to learn within it, and ultimately move from Beyoncé’s presentation of the question to contemplating the substance of her claim. A demand following Audre Lorde. Although at times she appears cheerful and happy over the course of the video, it’s anger that drives the ferocious force of the song forward. The vocal delivery is full of angst; Beyoncé works through a full arsenal of guttural emphasis, with high-powered, punctuated attacks on consonants in each word, searing highs and lows. And the soundtrack is up-tempo and unrelenting, never offering a moment to breathe—the rhythm repeats in a swift, cyclonic four-count and sweeps the listener away. It’s like a hurricane with a heavy kick drum. Like storm winds, the video also offers a brief eye, only to quickly thrust the audience back into its raging gusts and an interrogation of a system that creates the title question in the first place.
Before the eye of the storm, though, cultural references cycle through the video’s whirlwind. Though the styling places the action in the 1950s, viewers are immediately whisked back even further in time via the red kerchief Beyoncé dons in early shots while working on a car. Not only is the kerchief reminiscent of Mammy stereotypes Black women have constantly faced and challenged, it also invokes Rosie the Riveter: that now-iconic feminist image originally painted by Norman Rockwell, thought to be based off real-life Rose Will Monroe and popularized on posters in the early 1940s. Beyoncé explicitly revisited and remade that image in her own likeness in a separate photoshoot posted to Instagram on July 22, 2014. And Beyoncé-as-Rosie does some significant political work. Rosie the Riveter is a white woman, and her image was initially used much like the Uncle Sam poster was—to entice support of the war effort through various forms of service. Rosie posters were emblazoned with the slogan “We can do it!” in order to get women to take on the factory jobs men were leaving during World War II. Women could help the nation in wartime by getting to work. Trouble was, many Black women and women of color were already working outside their homes. The previous luxury of not having to work was largely reserved for privileged white women.
B.B. Homemaker, styled as Rosie, exposes those contradictions and further subverts the imperialist underpinnings too, by exposing “at home” as their own form of imperialism, still reminiscent of slavery. Rosie empowered women to join a workforce specifically in service to the state. Black women and other women of color, however, were already working in domestic jobs, usually in the households of white women. The ability of white women writ large to join the workforce, which in turn supported the war effort, was often already contingent upon Black women’s labor. And it’s been historically revised as a major (white) feminist victory. Black women were still expected to do the multiple forms of work necessary to create the possibility of white women’s demand for work. Beyoncé’s shown doing not only the traditionally feminine work around the house of dusting, cooking dinner, and washing the clothes, but also the traditionally masculine work of landscaping and fixing an overheating car. And she’s tired. And rightfully angry. Beyoncé’s saying no. She doesn’t perform any of these domestic tasks satisfactorily. All while styled quite provocatively—another taboo for sitcoms of the fifties. She burns dinner. She’s terrified of a garden snake. She can’t figure out how to fix the car, rejecting the expectation of her already doubled workload through her parodied, overwrought failures. They expose the expectations as unfair and unequal while Beyoncé’s makeup runs, smears down her face and she spills martinis all over the carpet and bedspread. She never attempts to clean up the mess. She chain-smokes throughout the video, steam coming from her nose and mouth in unseemly, unfeminine ways—more refused expectations blown back into the winds of the song.
It’s also easy to see Bettie Page—known as the iconic pinup girl from the 1950s—in the video’s aesthetic. The sitcom nature of the video and the Pagelike costuming put sexuality and housewife duties in tension—multiple demands, not disparate things. This blending shows Beyoncé playing a character who was largely unavailable to Black women during the time in which the video is set. Page was a white woman, and Beyoncé’s invocation exists as another subversion by pointing out the lack of ways Black women were able to embrace sexuality in the mainstream, though Eartha Kitt, who would come to be known as an iconic sex kitten, was beginning to make waves in cabaret and stage productions during Page’s heyday. Another parallel to the Page-esque centerfold was Josephine Baker, already a strong influence on Beyoncé from the B’Day era forward. Baker fled the US for Europe decades earlier, to escape the blatant racism she regularly experienced in her youth. She had cultivated a distinguished career abroad, and was still well-known in the 1950s. Baker seamlessly blended erotics, sexuality, motherhood, and politics. She became a civil rights activist and even did a stint as a spy for the French government during World War II, while Rosie was emblazoned on those US posters. Baker absolutely eschewed all preconceived notions or rules about what a Black woman could be, and Beyoncé as a Black woman invoking Bettie Page is also certainly an invocation of Baker as celebratory (and predated) counterpoint to mark the limits of the US imagination.
It wasn’t until 1968 that a Black woman was given a main role as the protagonist of a major television sitcom. Diahann Carroll starred in Julia as the title character on NBC for three seasons. Julia was a single mother, working as a nurse and supporting her son. The show marked an important pop culture first in terms of representation of Black women on TV, but also stands as evidence of how long it took and how little progress has been made since. Beyoncé, merely through her presence in this video and the time period invoked, is challenging the whiteness of pop culture in general, and carrying that challenge forward in time. Aside from a few popular shows—a majority of them produced by Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland production company or Oprah Winfrey’s OWN—mainstream television remains largely whitewashed, and diversity gets embraced only in niche markets, or written and cast only as stereotypes. Parts for which race is not expressly named continue to be seen as white by default, reinforcing the unspoken universality of whiteness.
In her historic 2015 win as the first Black woman to take home an Emmy for Lead Actress in a Drama Series, Viola Davis quoted Harriet Tubman to reinforce this exact point. “In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely white flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me, over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line.” Beyoncé positioning herself as a Black woman in roles that were never meant to belong to Black women—by channeling the outsider energy of Eartha Kitt and Josephine Baker while subverting Bettie Page and Rosie the Riveter iconography—calls out the same line Tubman and Davis invoked, reframing it all as “Why don’t you love me?” Beyoncé’s got everything anyone needs, as the lyrics attest: beauty, class, style, ass, a full bank account, knowledge, smarts, sexual prowess, empowered pleasures and desires, success. But she still runs up against the line. Davis mentioned the only thing that separated those white women over the line and the Black women who couldn’t get across wasn’t any innate quality like talent, which Black women have in excess—it was opportunity. Beyoncé forces the viewer to see and grapple with the racist, arbitrary nature of that line. And she demands an explanation.
The eye of the storm mentioned earlier takes place during the video, not the audio track. The rhythm of the song throughout has been fast, persistent, relentless. But the video breaks where a traditional song’s bridge might appear. The exuberantly hokey sitcom music returns while B.B. Homemaker relaxes, away from her expected chores. The one chore she does perform during the brief respite is dusting off a line of Grammys on the mantelpiece—some of the sixteen Beyoncé had won at the time. The scene interrupts the repeated “Why don’t you love me?” by showing that Beyoncé is actually loved and respected as a performer, though the Grammys themselves have a long history of pushing Beyoncé’s work in particular, and Black women’s work in general, to the margins of niche categories, just like Black women’s representation in pop culture overall. She’s the second most awarded and single most nominated female artist at the Grammys (twenty-three awards and sixty-six nominations at the end of 2018), but has been egregiously snubbed for the Recording Academy’s most prestigious Album of the Year award three times (an award only three Black women have ever won)—2017’s Lemonade snub being the most heinous. Significantly, the “Why Don’t You Love Me” video was released directly following the first of her three Album of the Year snubs for I Am … Sasha Fierce. Just because Beyoncé is one Black woman loved by many, it doesn’t mean all Black women are loved or celebrated by society. It doesn’t even mean she’s given the full respect she deserves from those in power. It shows that she’s still an exception that proves the unfortunate rule, just like in “Pretty Hurts.”
There’s no husband or romantic partner shown in “Why Don’t You Love Me.” There’s no children or dog, both of which she threatens to take with her when she leaves. Only Beyoncé as B.B. Homemaker singing—sometimes shouting—into a phone. The “you” is, in large part, America, the system, just like in Lemonade and much of Beyoncé’s other music. Rosie the Riveter and a featured red, white, and blue motif throughout the video speak back to America as well. This is Beyoncé as a Black Rosie the Riveter, calling Uncle Sam on the telephone to ask why he doesn’t, hasn’t, and might not ever love her. All she really wants to know is “Why?” Though the video uses the conceit of a 1950s sitcom to undercut some of the severity, Beyoncé’s performance actually seethes with anger and resentment, the rhythms of which demand to be taken seriously.
She re-creates this critical, political force when performing “Why Don’t You Love Me” live too, at the same moment the eye of the storm appears in the video. While singing the song, she abruptly stops the music and threatens to walk off stage. She demands those in attendance cheer for her. Loud. And audiences always do, of course. But Beyoncé builds her dissatisfaction into the performance. She begins to dramatically repeat the title question with increasingly impressive runs and riffs, pausing after each refrain to elicit even bigger reactions. She mimes leaving, walks away and turns her back to insinuate the audience hasn’t given her exactly the reaction she wants. She won’t leave, though, will she? For a moment, sitting there in arenas or stadiums, or watching the performances back at home, people might get scared, because she draws out the pause to uncomfortably long lengths. During her feigned retreat, twin dancers Laurent and Larry Nicolas Bourgeois (collectively known as Les Twins) perform as hype men, begging the audience to scream and applaud louder so she’ll return. So audiences scream their lungs out. She’s asking, “Why don’t you love me?” and they’re trying to prove she is loved above all else.
The entire performance is kitsch to make a larger political point. Beyoncé, a Black woman, is refusing to continue performing until she receives exactly what she wants. She holds all the cards. She’s trying to illuminate the disconnect between loving Beyoncé but not loving Black women generally—trying to erase Davis’s and Tubman’s line, not toe it. She’s pointing out the inconsistency in the public’s unyielding adoration and love of her and the treatment of Black women in society on a daily basis. Her brief refusal to perform stands in for a much larger objection and refusal, thrown back at America. Only when she deems the reaction by the crowd enough does she drop her hand, signaling the band’s return to finish the song. She then increases the already blistering tempo, further spinning the winds of the hurricane as she repeats the chorus. The eye in the storm during her live performances is reconfigured, because she’s the only one experiencing the calm. For the audience, it’s a mad, exasperated frenzy to prove they love her and can be trusted to behave accordingly. During the video, viewers could enjoy the respite with her, but on stage, she’s the only one standing still. Everyone else is jumping and spinning in the stands. The shoe is on the other foot in a reversal of traditional power dynamics. A boss move fueled by her resentment, not of her audience, but of a system. The move forces everyone watching to ask: Am I doing everything I can to counter the very system that perpetuates the need for Beyoncé to angrily ask, “Why don’t you love me?” to begin with?
The song ends conspicuously. After countless attempts to prove herself worthy, deserving, exceptional, Beyoncé plainly states, “There’s nothing not to love about me / I’m lovely … Maybe you’re just not the one / Or maybe you’re just plain …” and trails off. She refuses to finish the lyric in line with the beat of the song, while the drums continue to roll. “Why Don’t You Love Me” displays the tempering of rage into resentment in real time. There’s no answer to the question she’s asking that doesn’t admit at least a modicum of complicity with the system that forces her to ask it. She’s orchestrating her anger, fine-tuning her resentment while pointing back with condemnation. The only explanation for why she isn’t loved lies with the “you” in the song, not with her. She’s lovely. It’s America’s problem. She finally finishes the last lyric unexpectedly on an odd, as opposed to even, count of the measure, after a prolonged musical outro. “Maybe you’re just not the one / Or maybe you’re just plain … dumb.” It ends midmeasure with an indictment thrown back at the listener. A slap across the face. It’s the metaphorical, imaginary soft stabbing bell hooks wanted to perform on that airplane. And the word echoes into the silence, leaving viewers and listeners reeling. Maybe Beyoncé’s right. If some individuals can’t see their own complicity in all of this, maybe they are just ignorant.
You Lied
Beyoncé’s “Resentment” first appeared as the last official track on B’Day—what listeners were left with as the music faded and the album closed. The final taste of B’Day proper. Rather than wrapping the record up with a bow, it provoked more questions through what Daphne Brooks noted was an especially unusual and dissonant “uncomfortable crescendo, a jagged little pill for fans to swallow.” It’s not just a song about a cheating partner and the difficulty of repairing a breach in trust, loyalty, and fidelity. It foregrounds a lie and prefigures the main thrust of the narrative of Lemonade. “Resentment” painstakingly lingers on that lie, never lets it go. Moreover, the song was a centerpiece of both iterations of the On the Run Tour, and cited as evidence for personal relationship and marriage turmoil at different moments in Beyoncé’s career. Once again, though, the “you” Beyoncé is singing to is a romantic partner on one register, but the “you” is also the liar more generally, the one who doesn’t love her—society, the system, America. Because America has lied, broken promises it never intended to fulfill. Repeatedly, and to Black women especially.
There’s no music video for “Resentment,” which caused it to stand out more against the B’Day video anthology. It’s the only song from B’Day without one. The first time Beyoncé performed the song live was in 2009 during a set of small concerts in Las Vegas, later released on DVD as I Am … Yours. Before starting the song, she asked the audience, “How many of you have ever been lied to? I’m sure everyone has; we all have. This song is about a relationship after you’ve been lied to, and you’re trying your best to forgive. It’s really difficult ’cause you never forget.” Her extended introduction returned to the lie more than once, while not taking a stand on what repair might look like. Rather, she keeps the lie alive by holding forgetting and forgiving in impossible tension. More than just introducing a ballad about a lying partner, she was mapping resentment as politics. She left the circumstances vague, though cheating becomes obvious in the song’s lyrics, choosing to highlight the lie itself and not its substance. Building on everything else Beyoncé interrogates about race, gender, sexuality, and class in America, the lie becomes the entire premise and promise of America itself. The lie of equal opportunity. The lie/line Harriet Tubman exposed that imposes separation. The lie of freedom broken down in Lemonade.
Beyoncé drew the audience into the lie to open the song, asking everyone witnessing the performance to read their own experiences onto the dynamics of a broken promise. She created an intimate atmosphere—even through her choice to sit on the steps leading to the stage as she sang the song to an already intimate, smaller audience—in order to make a powerful statement: You can’t forget; the lie will always exist whether it’s forgiven or not. She asked how many knew what it felt like to be lied to, but she also drew some members of the audience close to accuse them of being the liar. The urgency and intimacy of the message was paired with some of her most soulful, roof-shattering, sidesplittingly emotive live vocals and meticulous runs. She transmutes the hurt and pain of the lyrics into an impassioned political plea to expose the underlying lie and her own refusal to let it go, despite multiple attempts. She’s simply “much too full of resentment,” indicating that some hurt remains regardless of societal or even personal pressure to forgive and/or forget. Some lies or actions are simply too egregious, and individual forgiveness can slide uneasily into the erasure of systemic complicity. “Resentment” keeps the hurt and anger alive, refuses to let the system off the hook. Another palimpsest, impossible to erase. In more words of Brittney Cooper, “However important forgiveness may be as a personal act, it does not make for sound and effective politics.” So Beyoncé won’t forgive or forget. She’ll continue to give liars a hard time, even. She’s still giving them a hard time a decade later on Lemonade and beyond.
Resentment says, structurally, that lies shouldn’t be forgotten or forgiven, though individuals may personally choose to practice one or both. As a politics, lies should be resented—acknowledged and remembered, constantly keeping accountability alive as a process—never forgotten. Remember the example of the cracks and fissures of the kintsugi bowl. Imagine what resenting America looks and feels like, using Beyoncé’s experience as a Black woman in the United States as an example. To imagine that resentment is to also practice using intersectionality as an analytic lens. At the same time, imagine being resented and trying to determine how to remedy that resentment. Because everyone can be a liar and lied to variously, often simultaneously, on a sliding scale. Everyone plays different or multiple roles in this metaphoric relationship. Acknowledging harm doesn’t erase good. One should expect the most from any relationships or system that they are part of, in which they participate daily. Constructive critique should correctly be seen as more beneficial than ignoring a problem, as it leads to more critical conversations around healing and repairing lies, mending broken promises. And it all begins with resentment, fermenting anger and rage, attending to them with a dash of tough love and critical dialogue.
In addition to the Las Vegas performance, “Resentment” was featured in its entirety as part of the narrative of Life Is But a Dream. The performances (and subsequent On the Run versions) incorporate a significant lyric change from the recorded version on B’Day, a quick change Beyoncé might even intentionally muffle so as to allow multiple interpretations. Especially given her precise enunciation and diction elsewhere. While refuting any potential justifications for the infidelity in the song, Beyoncé originally recorded, “Like I couldn’t do it for you / Like your mistress could.” However, in live versions the lyrics are aggressively altered, infusing even more anger and rage into the thrust of the song. I always say a misheard lyric can create just as much meaning in its reception as the correct lyrics, and though Beyoncé changes “your mistress” to “that wack bitch,” students always and without prompting express shock at Beyoncé unleashing fury against “that white bitch” after viewing both the 2009 concert and Life Is But a Dream performances of “Resentment” together. I misheard it many times myself before discerning other possibilities. Either way, that initial mishearing sticks with me as meaningful, especially as students continue to hear it.
“Wack bitch” is certainly less polite than “mistress,” but “white bitch” goes further to name the political root of all the system’s lies. It nods to Carol Anderson’s study of how white rage, unleashed and unchecked, has produced such inequality today. Who knows? Maybe Beyoncé wants audiences to hear multiple phrases simultaneously. Squeeze the words together yourself, coupled with dramatic delivery, and it’s easy to disguise one phrase for the other. What would it mean for a Black woman to pour out her heart and simultaneously express distress and resentment over the “white bitch” that isn’t even half of her, yet gets celebrated on every magazine cover, TV show, fashion runway? The possible use of “white bitch” here calls out the entire system of white supremacy and white feminism once again, and is not out of line with Beyoncé’s other artistic commentary. The “white bitch” in “Resentment” is the predecessor of “Becky with the good hair” in “Sorry.” And Beyoncé can’t forgive. She can’t forget. Or more correctly, she won’t forgive, won’t forget. During the final leg of the On the Run II tour, Beyoncé validated the above reading, altering the lyrics even further to denounce that “desperate, mediocre, white bitch” explicitly, leaving much less room for speculation. Despite her naked candor in early versions of “Resentment,” most still failed to hear the political complaint she was voicing years before Lemonade and On the Run II; it mainly got subsumed into gossip over her personal marital issues. It often still does.
Beyoncé still can’t believe at the end of “Resentment.” She wishes she could, but all the excuses used to justify the central lie “really don’t apply.” Just like any answer to the question “Why don’t you love me?” pointed straight back at the system. She rejects the simple solution—forgive or forget—and she chooses to trust herself. She won’t reconcile with the white bitch of a system. And so, the resolution of “Resentment” is much like the resolution of “Why Don’t You Love Me”: nonexistent. Because there’s no real satisfactory, quick-fix resolution when it comes to racism and sexism in the United States, so audiences are necessarily thrown directly back into the thick of it. But with a redistribution of power, Beyoncé no longer has to justify her resentment; others have to explain what created that resentment in the first place. By insisting on fostering resentment, not getting over it, Beyoncé is taking the white rage and resentment Anderson named and turning it back against those who wield it. She’s exploring alternative outlets for hooks’s killing rage so that it doesn’t dissipate in tears for lack of options. In tempering rage, Beyoncé cultivates resentment and fully embraces the double entendre of hooks’s title: that a killing rage is justified, and also that the killing of rage births new meaningful possibilities. Beyoncé’s resentment keeps lies of the past alive, unflinchingly holds them to the light and shines the spotlight even brighter. In so doing, she suggests it’s the only way to heal.