There were long moments, for me, during Beyoncé’s The Renaissance World Tour this summer, and also her soul-reviving new concert movie, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, where I just fell silent, gawked, unashamed, into space, wholly transfixed by what I was exposed to, in front of me, around me. Other than, say, Prince, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and Tina Turner, I have never felt energy like this before from the live performance of a musical artist. I would have to point to political leaders far gone and very much present—Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Nelson Mandela, V (formerly Eve Ensler), Michelle and Barack Obama, AOC—where my mind was so thoroughly blown, my wig so methodically shoved backwards, that I knew I instantly had my life edited, in a profoundly dramatic way, by what was being presented to me as an idea, a vision. In a word, that is called magic.

Moreover, we know the m-word in the doting hands of a Black woman like Beyoncé is called “Black girl magic.” They are not just three words which have been haphazardly strung together with a hashtag in front for social media, or to boost egos or a vague sense of self-worth. No. It is equally a fearless emancipation proclamation and a gripping declaration of independence. Because it is not merely some passing attempt to combat hate and oppression. No. Beyoncé marches, unapologetically, through the rough and rugged political landscape of our America clear she is a woman, a woman who is painted Black, unbought and unbossed. For she is the answer to Sojourner Truth’s pleading question about the role of Black women in the battle for freedom and justice for everybody; and she is also Fannie Lou clutching her purse, with the sharecropper’s strength of her battered fingers, as she sang the sorrow songs of exclusion at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. To make it plain, if we erase Black women from the history of America, we do not have America.

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