Tina Knowles-Lawson was shocked when a white woman had the audacity to criticize her over “allowing” Beyoncé to marry Jay Z.
During an appearance on CBS Mornings with Gayle King, she was discussing an upcoming docuseries that she executive-produced called Profiled: The Black Man, which will spotlight how Black men are stereotyped and discriminated against. Knowles discussed how she has experienced this first hand and had to defend her son-in-law Jay Z against a white woman who blatantly stereotyped him to her during a conversation.
“I can remember getting on a plane, and an older white woman saying, ‘Oh, your son is a gangster rapper, right? How did you let him marry your daughter?’,” she said. “It was just shocking to me and I said, ‘No, actually, my son is a CEO’. She didn’t think of him as a CEO, or even a talented celebrity that was a great businessman. At that time, I remember thinking, ‘I can’t be mad at her, because that is what the media portrays.'”
Despite Jay Z being a father of three beautiful children, a billionaire, a CEO, an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a 23-time Grammy Award winner and much more, all the white woman could see was a “gangster.” Knowles said she didn’t fault the white woman for her microaggression because of the way media portrays Black men, famous or not.
“I sat there and I thought about how the media portrays Black men and how that is typical of the things that they would focus on, the negatives,” Lawson added. “[They] try to portray us as these dangerous, our men as dangerous, uneducated. Gangster rapper, that’s all she could come up with, but that’s what she had been seeing on TV and all in the media. That’s how we’re portrayed, unfortunately.”
Profiled: The Black Man will premiere Feb. 12 on Discovery+.
