Tina Knowles-Lawson stopped by CBS Mornings to chat with Gayle King about her upcoming project Profiled: The Black Man. In her chat with King, she shared an experience in which she had an odd encounter with an older white woman.
She says, “I can remember getting on a plane, and an older white woman saying, ‘Oh, your son is a gangster rapper, right? How did you let him marry your daughter?'”
Instead of getting upset, she responded, “No, actually, my son is a CEO.” Tina talked about how she really couldn’t be upset with the woman because the media portrays black men negatively. Though she was shocked that someone had the nerve to say something like this, it was how the media was.
“She didn’t think of him as a CEO or even a talented celebrity that was a great businessman. At that time, I remember thinking, ‘I can’t be mad at her because that is what the media portrays.'”
The woman referred to her daughter Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who wed in 2008. The power couple shares three children, Blue Ivy, 10, and 4-year-old twins Rumi and Sir.
Tina described her real emotions during the moment to King.
“I sat there, and I thought about how the media portrays Black men and how that is typical of the things that they would focus on, the negatives. [They] try to portray us as these dangerous, our men as dangerous, uneducated. Gangster rapper, that’s all she could come up with, but that’s what she had been seeing on TV and all in the media. That’s how we’re portrayed, unfortunately.”
Besides discussing the difficult confrontation, Tina promoted the series she’s an executive producer of Discovery+ and OWN Network’s Profiled: The Black Man. The four-part docuseries hosted by Mack Wilds will examine the origins of Black stereotypes and how it impacts Black men in America and society.
The show premieres Saturday, February 12, on Discovery+. `
