Tina Turner’s View on Africans Makes It Extremely Hard For Me To Mourn Her.
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Yet another reason to avoid deifying celebrities and see them for what they truly are.
Yesterday, the passing of one of the most outstanding musicians of the 20th century was announced.
And the outpouring of grief was perfectly understandable.
Not very many artists get to reinvent themselves through the decades in the way that she has.
But Tina Turner was no ordinary artist.
Right from the very beginning with Ike Turner, her mettle and dynamism set her apart from the rest.
And these unique talents carried through the peaks and troughs of her personal life and musical career and allowed her to leave the brutally abusive Ike Turner with nothing only to emerge better and stronger than before.
But there’s a sordid aspect to the now departed Ms. Turner that most folks don’t know about.
The fact that she went to apartheid South Africa to perform.
While it is important to point out that it wasn’t just her — Eartha Kitt and Ray Charles also had the dubious distinction of going to a country, which was doing to Africans what the Dixiecrats were doing to them in the South.
This sordid episode is made much worse with her pronouncements about the folks she encountered in South Africa.
And if you think I am lying, watch the footage below:
When we carefully dissect the comments made by Turner, it shows the devastating effectiveness of white supremacy.
That she in her previous incarnation as Annie Mae Bullock did what her forbears did —picked cotton — barely registered in her consciousness. Nor did it register that the miserable existence which was lived by folks who looked like her was no different from the people whom she was in Africa.
Her pronouncements in the footage above, we get to appreciate that far too many Black…
