Beyoncé performed a tribute to the militant Black Panthers Party during Sunday evening’s halftime show at Super Bowl 50 that some, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, called a blatant attack on law enforcement. But the pop star might have been late to the performance if she hadn’t received a highway-clearing police escort to deliver her to Levi’s Stadium on time.
As some users pointed out on Twitter, police cleared the highway so that Beyoncé could make it to Santa Clara without sitting in pesky game-day traffic:
But during the Super Bowl halftime show, the pop star performed a full-scale tribute to Black Lives Matter and the militant, anti-law enforcement Black Panthers, with her backup dancers clad in Panther uniforms with fists raised in the “black power” salute.
In an interview Monday on Fox News, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani accused Beyoncé of using the halftime show as a “platform to attack police officers, who are the people who protect her and protect us and keep us alive.”
“What we should be doing, in the African-American community and in all communities, is build up respect for police officers and focus on the fact that when something does go wrong, okay, we’ll work on that,” Giuliani said.
Needless to say, social media users were eager to weigh in on the pop star’s apparent hypocrisy.
The day before the Super Bowl, Beyoncé released the politically-charged music video for “Formation,” the song she would go on to perform at the game. The video is heavy on Black Lives Matter imagery, including sequences of white police officers harassing young black people and a shot of graffiti that reads, “Stop shooting us.”
On Friday, Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z announced that his streaming music service Tidal would donate $1.5 million to Black Lives Matter and other social justice advocacy groups.