To Hell with James Madison and his flute!

So, I know who Lizzo is, even if I couldn’t sing one of her songs all the way through from start to finish if a billion dollars was on the line 😆.

Still, I know enough to know that Lizzo is a talented flautist and vocalist who has been somewhat controversial during her career due to a style of dress that has polarized folks into “she is embracing her creativity” support, or “she needs to put on some clothes” detraction. And trust, her detractors, particularly among those who do not like plus sized people flexing their bodies, have been quite loud and oft profane in their disapproval.

Separately, I know who James Madison (below) was; the fourth president of the United States was the slave owning draftsman of the U.S. Constitution that was ratified 235 years ago.

Like most of his slave owning ilk, Madison is revered by many Americans regardless of their political persuasion, while he is alternately reviled as a hypocrite by many Blacks like yours truly who read the lofty ideals espoused in his constitutional parchment that still endures, while realizing that my Black ancestors were designated “3/5th of a white person” by Madison’s own racist hand so long ago.

Interestingly enough, every now and again, history and pop culture meet, as Lizzo was asked by THE Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, to play a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison. Legend has it that when the British burned Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 that the very flute at issue was one of the last items that First Lady Dolly Madison grabbed before taking off on the run. Lizzo, true to her classically trained flute playing self, obliged—to the delight of millions of her fans! Lizzo’s short set of measures, played while she “Twerked,” was to the chagrin of a whole new set of detractors, mostly white and conservative, folks who had likely never heard of her until Fox and Newsmax starting looping her remark: “Bitch, I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s..We just made history tonight!”

Now, whether you find Lizzo’s words or twerking distasteful or not is not all that relevant to the main point in that I can only scratch my head at anyone who thinks that Lizzo “defiled” James Madison’s instrument, as wanna-be-white woman Candace Owens, a “yessa massa” Black conservative if ever there was one, said on social media this weekend. Or, the equally condescending words of  Matt Walsh, a white conservative pundit, who accused Lizzo of “desecrating American history just for the sake of it.”

Whatever…

To me, whether you are a Lizzo fan, hater, or generally indifferent, there is no comparing her onstage acts to the vile acts of James Madison, a man who defiled Black flesh and desecrated Black spirits and traditions when he was buying, selling, beating, and raping Black flesh in the 18th Century. To my eternal frustration, ours is still a nation where the Black descendants of slave peddling patrician politicians like Madison and Thomas Jefferson still have modern day skeptics who don’t want to believe that the Jeffersonian/Madisonian DNA that these ones share came from those presidents’ predilection for raping Black women in the slave quarters!

Shocked? If you knew all about Jefferson defiling his wife’s half-sister, the enslaved Sally Hemings, but had never heard the allegations that Madison defiled his own enslaved half-sister (and produced a male heir called “Jim,” for “James,”) consider reading The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family, a book written by Madison’s Black descendant, Dr. Betty Kearse, M.D. More crucially, Dr. Kearse, a pediatrician, notes how white Madison descendants are too timid to submit to DNA testing to settle the matter once and for all!

I am never shocked, mind you, when racists do racist things and in modern America, one of the vilest acts from racists is when they deny the truth of historical events, people, and genealogy. Such is why men like James Madison are upheld as paragons of virtue when, the simple truth is that they were intellectually sharp but spiritually dull degenerates who held no qualms with defiling Black and Native flesh. Or, desecrating Black and Native customs—all in their attempts to “form a more perfect Union,” as Madison quipped several years before producing a Black male heir with his enslaved half-sister. That, to me, is the greater story—not Lizzo playing a flute that most likely was played by an enslaved flautist on the plantation anyway.

Lest we forget…

Hobbservation Point is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Chuck Hobbs is a freelance journalist who won the 2010 Florida Bar Media Award and has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.