When Kelly Rowland strutted her stuff onto the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night for the premiere of “Marcello Mio,” she posed for the cameras like the international superstar she is — and the photographers and paparazzi were loving her.
A white woman usher on the scene? Not so much.
The woman tried to rush Rowland off the carpet. Words were exchanged. A visibly upset Rowland pointed her finger in the usher’s face. The usher seemed to laugh it off with her colleagues.
Black folks on the internet, however, were not amused.
So, a clash between a superstar member of Destiny’s Child — one of the best-selling girl groups of all time — and an usher is yet another reminder of how difficult it is to be Black in predominantly white spaces. And it’s a reminder that no matter how someone treats them, Black women aren’t supposed to ever be angry.
When asked about the incident on Thursday at the amfAR Cannes Gala, Rowland was both honest and diplomatic.
“The woman knows what happened. I know what happened,” she told the Associated Press. “I have a boundary, and I stand by those boundaries, and that is it.”
Rowland also pointed to the elephant on the red carpet, so to speak.
“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,” Rowland said. “I stood my ground, and she felt like she had to stand hers. But I stood my ground.”
“Don’t Talk to Me Like That”
In a now-viral video from Tuesday, the usher — dubbed “French Karen” by folks on social media — seemed to step on Rowland’s dress. Rowland was gracious about that, but then the usher began policing Rowland’s presence, including blocking Rowland from photographers. It’s unclear what the usher said as she tried to hurry Rowland along, her hand at Rowland’s back.
One professional lipreader said Rowland repeatedly told the usher, “Don’t talk to me like that,” and then said, “You’re not my mother. I told you not to talk to me like that.”
That revelation got some white folks’ tongues wagging about how Rowland — not the usher — was out of line. They scolded Rowland for playing the race card and acting like a diva undeservedly.
A team of researchers unpacking the angry Black woman stereotype wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2022, “when some people see a Black woman become angry, they’re likely to attribute that anger to her personality — rather than an inciting situation.”
Meanwhile, the usher benefitted from white supremacy’s projections of white women as fragile and innocent.
Entertainment journalist Nikki Fowler, who is in Cannes, was having none of that, though. She wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Black women “aren’t the problem, when I can count on ONE hand how many Black women are in the audience at Cannes.”
Fowler pointed out that “maybe the problem is ‘some’ of your ignorant poorly trained security and ushers that need to leave their Karen ism at home.”
But many white people — whether in France or elsewhere — continue to hold tight to a white supremacy-based standard of how they expect Black folks to behave in public.
A Threat to a White Space
In his 2022 book, “Black in a White Space,” Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale, wrote that the size of one’s bank account doesn’t matter: when you’re moving in a white space, there’s always a “Black tax.”
Anderson told Yale News that “In white spaces, white people dominate, and compared to their Black counterparts, enjoy an implicit power along with a degree of moral authority that Black people fundamentally lack.”
Black folks just “want to be able to get through their day uneventfully, without experiencing arbitrary treatment based on their Blackness,” Anderson said.
That’s clearly what Rowland, who has walked numerous red carpets over the past 20-odd years, was trying to do in Cannes.
But people’s “minds are typically already made up about the Black person’s ‘place’ and the threat they believe he or she poses to the white space,” Anderson said. They may believe she didn’t deserve to be there in the first place.
As a result, white people are “inclined at times to weaponize their prejudices, to put the Black person in their ‘place.’”
The minute she let herself shine on the red carpet as the superstar she is, Kelly Roland became a threat. And by standing up for herself, Rowland became even more threatening because she publicly rejected the place a white woman decided she belonged in.
Then she came back on Thursday and let the world see she’s not exactly unbothered. Rowland appeared to be holding back tears as she detailed what happened.
But there’s no doubt Kelendria Trene Rowland stood up for herself and remains unbossed.
