As we continue to swim through the dreaded waters of 2024, we find moments of hope as we are blessed with cultural milestones provided by individuals like the great Rep. Jasmine Crockett who singlehandedly rightfully read a bitch to filth and boosted our morale with the now iconic “Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body” moment.
We also have moments from the Festival de Cannes, or as we Westerners pronounce with artificial worldliness, the Cannes Film Festival which kicked off last week. It was a pleasure to see Tangerine filmmaker Sean Baker walk away with the Palme d’Or for his latest film Anora, a pic about a sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch.
But as culture gives, it also takes away. One of the biggest stories to come out of Cannes was the treatment of the always amazing Kelly Rowland on the red carpet at Cannes.
No one knows exactly what happened except Rowland and what some people are calling “Usher Karen”. It looked like a short film with moments of Renaissance painting-level beauty and drama.
In the footage, we see the security guard/usher lead Rowland up the red carpet stairs. The usher feels like she is hovering and being a tad pushy. We can also see in the video that the usher crossed a line with Rowland.
A couple days later during an interview with the Associated Press at the amfAR gala, Rowland shared her experience at Cannes. “The woman knows what happened. I know what happened. I have a boundary and I stand by those boundaries and that is it,” Rowland said. “And there were other women that attended that carpet who did not quite look like me and they didn’t get scolded or pushed off or told to get off. I stood my ground and she felt like she had to stand hers. But I stood my ground.”
This was not an isolated incident. Usher Karen continued her red carpet cock blocking behavior with Dominican actress Massiel Taveras as well as K-pop star Yoona.
If anything, it’s clear that from the sampling of footage, Usher Karen’s behavior is the same so at least she is consistent — consistent and micro-aggressive — but consistent nonetheless.
Is this a racist incident? Maybe. But I can tell you that it’s not not racist.
I am as surprised at the treatment of Rowland, Taveras, and Yoona on the Cannes red carpet as much as I am surprised that Harrison Butker said some not-so-popular things in a commencement speech. SPOILER ALERT: He was put on blast for being homophobic and misogynistic.
Instances of racism and misogyny in sports, music, film, TV, politics, and other major sectors of culture will always be shocking… but they will always be expected because that’s the way these systems were built.
Butker is in the NFL, a hyper-masculine organization that isn’t exactly a community of saints who are welcoming of queer people and free of racism. The same can be said about Cannes.
The Cannes Film Festival has been scrutinized for its diversity and inclusion efforts as the landscape of Hollywood and the world has changed. In 2018, with the growing #TimesUp movement hitting the industry, Competition Jury president Cate Blanchett along with late great French icon Agnès Varda as well as Ava DuVernay, Lea Seydoux stood alongside a crowd of 82 women to represent the 82 female filmmakers — as opposed to 1,645 male directors that have competed in the fest up to that time. That same year, Cannes signed a commitment to diversity.
The following year Cannes rewarded an honorary Palme d’Or to Alain Delon despite who had admitted to slapping women, aligned himself with Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the French far-right National Front party, and said being gay is “against nature”.
After the pandemic delayed things, Cannes came back to the fold in 2021 and announced that Spike Lee would be the President of the Cannes jury for the 74th edition of the fest. The filmmaker made history as the first person from the African diaspora to be the President of the jury.
That’s great, right?
Although Cannes was moving at a glacial pace when it came to these initiatives, Deadline’s Valerie Complex wrote honestly about her experiences attending the global fest. She waxed poetic and told some harsh truths about the treatment of people of color — specifically women of color.
“Marginalized groups, specifically Black people, are excluded from these ‘elite’ environments,” Complex wrote in 2022. “Those in power refuse to accept that the media landscape is changing. The higher one climbs, the more egregious the microaggressions become. It is attributable to gatekeeping, where there remains a misunderstanding of what being established looks like.”
She continued later in the article: “For such an important festival, the goal must be for more of everyone — more equity for those who make films and those who cover them. It has to start with changes in attitude, a recognition that old bad habits have to be scrutinized by those with the power to accept or turn away worthy films or Black journalists who want equal treatment.”
This brings us back to Rowland, Taveras, and Yoona — three non-white women being treated differently on the Cannes red carpet. They are women experiencing the impact of gatekeeping in spaces not built for them. Therefore, by default, they get pushed to the side — and that’s exactly what Usher Karen did.
