Beyoncé made waves online when photos emerged of her wearing a “Buffalo Soldiers” shirt on her Cowboy Carter tour. Fans took particular issue with the shirt’s descriptions of “Indian opponents” as “antagonists” and “enemies of peace, order and settlement”.
In case you, too, need prescription glasses to read photos embedded for ants, I’ve typed out the relevant paragraphs from the Buffalo Soldiers shirt and included it under the cut (meaning the text is not from a secondary source, Mods, and any/all mistakes made are mine!):
“Called all sorts of names–most of them insulting–by various groups, the men of these two regiments were dubbed ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ by their Indian opponents. They were proud of this title, and the most prominent feature of the Tenth Cavalry’s regimental crest was the figure of a Buffalo.
“Their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries. All these they met many times and with success, regardless of extremes of climate and terrain that ranged from the broken, rugged, and torrid Big Bend of Texas to the rolling plains, badlands and sub-freezing temperatures of South Dakota. Many a frontier official owed his life and his job to the support given him by these black men in blue, and many more farmers and ranchers slept soundly in their beds because a thin line of black troopers guarded them from harm.”
This is not the first time that Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour merchandise has been called into question. Previously, fans spotted merch shirts featuring Blue Ivy, who is only 13 years old:
Buffalo Soldiers, Blue Ivy merch
The images are all from my public LJ albums (same album as the politics post), so hopefully they load this time, mods! Sorry for the issues!
