“Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama,” read a Fox news caption on June 11, 2008.
The caption appeared during a news segment on a conservative documentary highlighting Michelle Obama’s infamous remark, “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country.”
The caption became infamous in its own right. African American Studies and Sociology professor Celeste Watkins-Hayes brought Fox’s use of the term “baby mama” to discussion during a student panel in recognition of Black History Month, “From Beyonce to Bi-racial: Race Relations and the Policing of Black Authenticity,” in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities on Tuesday night.
“It’s placing her back in the South Side and emphasizing her motherhood,” said panelist Frederick Staidum, a doctoral candidate in African American Studies. “It becomes an essential part of her identity. She is not only a mama, but a mama through Obama.”
In addition to Staidum, three other African American Studies students, doctoral candidate Jean-Pierre Brutus and Weinberg seniors Maryum Kazeem and Fariah Ahmad, participated in the panel. The fall ’09 course “Controversial Blackness” organized the event.
Undergraduate students in the Department of African American Studies came together to sponsor Controversial Blackness, a series of three Black History Month events. The student panel was the second of the three engagements.
“The goal is to create a student space within the department to talk about things students don’t usually get to talk about,” said Kazeem, an organizer of the event. “It’s great to have a chance to speak on a panel because students don’t usually get to do that.”
Another of the controversial topics examined was contextualizing Beyonce’s sexually complex performance persona.
“She’s not a weak female character. She doesn’t comply to the Madonna-whore complex,” said Kazeem.
“She’s a binary of these two different identities—one sexual and one innocent.”
The audience viewed clips of some of her music videos to understand Beyonce’s many facets. Beyonce’s Single Ladies video features her J-setting, a popular Black queer dance style resembling majorettes, with two backup dancers.
”Black straight women want to be her, black straight men want to be with her, yet she’s borrowing from black queer performance,” said Brutus.
Next week, the series will close with a potentially controversial lecture, “I’ll Get Black to You: the Rules of Engagement in Black Studies, 2010” by African American Studies professor Michelle M. Wright, on February 18.