Beyoncé’s father, who helped mastermind the hip-hop icon’s rise to fame with Destiny’s Child, has spoken out about colorism in the music industry — saying that she and her sister, Solange, wouldn’t be as famous if they had darker skin.
Talking to Ebony, Mathew Knowles said the most famous black females in music all have light colored skin.
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“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 [Beyonce and Solange],” he said.
Knowles spoke to the magazine about his new book, Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, and how colorism has inserted itself into the music industry as well as American history.
He said that when he first met Beyoncé and Solange’s mother, Tina Knowles, he thought she was 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 in-tune with her Blackness,” he said.
Knowles explained that his preference for white or light-skinned women was ingrained in him from growing up in the deep south just outside Birmingham, Alabama.
“When I was growing up, my mother used to say, ‘Don’t ever bring no nappy-head 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,” he said.
He said that even at Fisk University, the historically black college he attended in 1972, colorism affected the admissions process.
“I was in the last class where they’d take out a brown paper bag, and if you were darker than the bag, you could not get into Fisk,” he told Ebony.
According to the Daily Mail, Knowles quit his full-time job when Beyoncé was 10 years old to manage her girl group, Girls Tyme, which later turned into Destiny’s Child. Three years later, Destiny’s Child signed a seven-album deal with Columbia/Sony.
Knowles co-managed Destiny’s Child throughout, and was also credited as executive producer on Beyonce‘s first solo album Dangerously In Love, before she ended her professional relationship with her father in 2011.
Beyoncé, husband Jay-Z and 6-year-old daughter Blue Ivy recently attended the 60th Annual Grammy Awards, where Jay-Z was up for Album of the Year.
In perhaps one of the most memorable moments from the night, Blue Ivy delighted social media when she shushed her mom and dad during Camila Cabello’s speech about the positives of immigration.
The CBS camera caught Blue Ivy first telling her mom to be quiet. Beyonce leaned over, and their daughter told them to calm down with her hands. Just like that, Beyonce stopped applauding and she had her parents’ undivided attention.
