Beyonce’s father: My girl’s a star thanks to ‘light’ skin
BEYONCE’S father has suggested her incredible success is down to her ‘lighter skin’.
Matthew Knowles said black stars were more likely to be played on the radio if they were paler in complexion.
In an astonishingly frank interview, he also admitted he was guilty of ‘colourism’ – same-race prejudice based on skin tone.
He even confessed he had only been interested in Beyonce’s mother Tina because her light skin fooled him into thinking she was actually white.
The 66-year-old explained that he had been conditioned from childhood to date white women as a way of ‘getting even’ for racial discrimination against blacks.
Although bold and to the point, his comments were broadly welcomed in America and many applauded Mr Knowles for speaking up. He once managed the careers of Beyonce and sister Solange, 31, who is also a successful singer.
Bringing his famous daughters into the debate, Mr Knowles claimed their meteoric rise was made easier by the ‘lighter’ colour of their skin.
He claimed it was no accident that artists like Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and his daughters were more likely to get their music played on pop radio stations. Beyonce, 36, is reportedly worth more than £272million and has sold more than 17 million records. Five or her singles have reached the top of the UK charts.
Her father was born in 1952 in Gadsden, Alabama, a small city 60 miles from Birmingham – where racial animosity was rife.
But discrimination also existed in his own family towards black people, he said. Mr Knowles who is now a communications lecturer at Texas Southern University, told Ebony magazine: ‘When I was growing up, my mother used to say: “Don’t ever bring no nappyhead black girl to my house”. In the deep south in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the shade of your blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message’. Nappy-head is a derogatory term used to describe short and tightly coiled hair.
Mr Knowles, who was discussing his new memoir, Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, added: ‘I used to date mainly white women or very high-complexion black women that looked white. I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was white.
‘Later I found out that she wasn’t, and she was actually very much intune with her blackness.
‘I had been conditioned from childhood. With eroticised rage, there was actual rage in me as a black man, and I saw the white female as a way, subconsciously, of getting even or getting back.’
He said he later learnt to question his beliefs after therapy.
Mr Knowles also tackled the issue of colourism. Asked if it was prominent in pop music, he said: ‘When it comes to black females, who are the people who get their music played on pop radio? Mariah Carey, Rihanna, the female rapper Nicki Minaj, my kids, and what do they all have in common?’
When the interviewer responded: ‘They’re all lighter skinned,’ he probed: ‘Do you think that’s an accident?’ When he was met with the response, ‘Of course not,’ he said: ‘So you get it!’. Reaction to the comments on social media was mostly positive with some saying they wished more black men would be so honest. One wrote on Twitter: ‘A lot of men don’t date women darker than them. They put lighter skinned women on pedestals. They gravitate towards women with “good hair”.
But another said: ‘We all knew part of Beyonce’s success was colourism. Knowles was a conspirator of that. So what is he trying to gain by exposing himself? He was just as much the problem’.
Mr Knowles and Beyonce have had a rocky relationship. He was absent for part of her childhood and briefly left her mother when the singer was only two months old. He took more of an interest when it became apparent that his daughter was a talented vocalist.
He quit his job selling office equipment to medical companies and managed her first band, Girls Tyme – which then morphed into the globally successful group Destiny’s Child. Mr Knowles was known for driving his children hard but he remained his daughters’ manager until they ditched him in 2011. That year Beyonce ordered an audit of her financial affairs and found her father had been stealing from her.
He split with Tina after 31 years when she discovered he’d had two children by two mistresses. Beyonce, who has three children with her husband – the rapper JayZ – maintains she has an amicable relationship with her father. But her music tells a different story.
In 2014 song Ring Off she wrote: ‘Mama, I understand your many sleepless nights / When you sit and you think about father’.
‘Conditioned from childhood’