Before higher education institutions began talking about “engaged scholars” and “outreach and engagement,” Black Studies students and faculty were talking about the obligation of the discipline to link Black Studies at colleges and universities to local Black communities.

It is fitting, if not ironic, that my husband met for the first time the most immediate members of his paternal birth family during the month of November: National Adoption Month.

Grown-up life can be rough. Raising three kids, negotiating the trials of marriage, and striving to be successful professionally leaves little room for my girls. Add in different life situations like no childcare or short bank accounts for some, and girls nights are rare in the over forty club.

I would imagine that, to my son, Troy Maxson’s hardness, stubbornness, and selfishness toward his sons and, in particular, his teenage son, Cory, made my son think about his relationship with his father. My husband is not Troy Maxson, but to a budding teenage boy, their disagreements and testosterone-driven arguments likely struck my son as quite similar to those between Troy and Lyon and especially between Troy and Cory.

We, the nation, inherited the sins of our forefathers and instead of correcting those sins many decades ago, the nation allowed them to fester and rot. Thus, today, the ramifications of unequal access to those four arenas central to citizenship and full incorporation into the nation—employment, education, healthcare, and housing—is playing out, literally, on all of our various screens, as one unarmed black person after the next is subjected to police violence (or mass incarceration). These violent altercations are shaped by both the historical racial inequities and the racialization and stereotypes imposed upon black citizens from slavery to the present.

Much of the Black Lives Matter movement is, understandably, focused on death and specifically the premature death of, often unarmed, black women, men, and children due to police violence. Beyond police violence, premature death afflicts black bodies throughout the lifespan due to health disparities, microaggressions, and simply living while black in a nation whose legal system and social institutions continuously fail to register black people as full citizens.

For some Beyoncé is a savior who is finding a political voice. For other she is an anti-white Benedict Arnold. And still to others she is nothing more than a capitalist appropriator or hyper-sexualized stereotype. I have no interest in debating or adding to the proclamations and indictments. Instead, I want to read between the lines of her performances and flesh out a different set of politics I think are at play.

Caddy-corner to the altercation, there was a group of white men and women watching the policing, almost like they were attending a lynching-bee. No one thought to question why the children were being treated as dangerous criminals. As the tensions escalated, several white men appeared, apparently acting as George Zimmerman-style “community watchmen.” Once the officer forces the girl to the ground by her neck and black teenage boys and girls rush toward them, a large white man stands between the two groups, keeping the teenagers from intervening.

While art critics consistently note Wiley’s adoption of European conventions in the larger than life paintings that appropriate the originals, attention is not paid to subtle nuances. A particularly important nuance is how Wiley redirects and, therefore, empowers the gaze.