Beyonce, 43, is facing strong backlash from her loyal fanbase after wearing an ‘offensive’ T-shirt.
The singer sparked outrage at the Paris stop of her Cowboy Carter tour after donning a T-shirt emblazoned with the Buffalo Soldiers, who were some of the first African Americans to serve in the US military.
While on its surface the shirt seems like a celebration of an often overlooked part of America’s history, there’s more to Bey’s T-shirt than meets the eye.
In the 1800s, the Buffalo Soldiers fought on the side of European colonizers against the Native Americans in the Indian Wars.
Fans pointed out that not only did Beyonce wear a shirt with the Buffalo Soldiers on the front of it, the back of the shirt also featured controversial passage about the Native Americans that they went up against.
According to ONTD, one verse on the garment reads, ‘Their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries.’
A number of Beyonce’s loyal fans took social media posts against her to express their outrage.
‘Not everything in Black history needs to be revered and turned into an aesthetic,’ wrote one.
‘The Buffalo Soldiers did awful things to indigenous people. The way she waves away their atrocities against indigenous people is gross. Beyoncé’s romanticism of this is beyond the pale.’
Another wrote, ‘Beyoncé wearing a Buffalo Soldiers shirt, an American army unit comprised exclusively of African Americans that helped European and white American colonists fight back Native Americans and seize control of their land, is not the serve she thinks it is.’
They added, ‘That Cowboy Carter album got her feeling all kinds of patriotic in all the wrong ways.’
