Question: what could be more provocative than Beyonce’s new, highly, politically charged song “Formation”? Answer: Saturday Night Live and their compelling take on white America.

In the sketch a perfectly undisturbed day in white America goes Apocalypse Now when the big news breaks that Beyonce has turned black, ending life as they know it.

As a part of the white community I will admit that I immediately felt this sketch to be a violent and incohesive caricature as it pertains to my particular frame of reference. Admittedly the rather disgusting thought arose in me that these white actors were performing shamelessly, pandering to a forward thinking movement that they wanted to be a part of. I thought about how these people were actively disenfranchising not just their race but an inseparable part of their own identity. It was a phenomena I was not, and am still not equipped to fully understand.

Needless to say I don’t disclose these thoughts without guilt as I know they are informed by ignorance. As a writer I know that I am only as free as my pen and that is why I share with you my experience at this confusing point in time; this point in time where the oppression of an entire culture has crept up on our country slowly, and then all at once.

It was as if I had fallen asleep amidst an underground revolution. Maybe I had. I’m still not sure if it’s my aging or simply the age that finds me dumbfounded upon hearing the veracious heartbeat of an entire people for the very first time.

Simply said: I and many others are being reintroduced to the black community, realizing that we are the beneficiaries of a mainstream culture that has been silently and painfully marginalizing to the minority. I’m understanding that this is the moment we haven’t yet experienced. We can feel caught in the very human tension of change; the “paralysis… where we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.” “We are”, as one poet once put it,

“alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us;...everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.”

I believe it’s the slow drag of “maybe” which continues to pick up speed and force the words: “maybe… maybe the song isn’t for us”. Maybe we are capable of containing otherness. Maybe we are afraid of who controls mainstream culture. Maybe we are terrified of what we lose when we aren’t at the top. And maybe we are a formation apart from another.