The False Myth - How Beyoncé Mocks History on Her Cowboy Tour

It was a performance meant as cultural emancipation - and ended as a historical misstep. When Beyoncé wore a T-shirt at a Juneteenth concert in Paris that portrayed the Buffalo Soldiers as heroes against "the enemies of peace," it sparked a wave of outrage. On the back of the shirt: a list of those allegedly threatening order - including "warring Indians" and "Mexican revolutionaries." That those labeled as enemies were precisely those who fought against colonialism, displacement, and ethnic erasure felt like a slap in the face to all those hoping for a fairer narrative of America's past. The response was swift. Indigenous activists, historians, and fans criticized the shirt as a symbol of revisionist thinking that reproduces anti-Indigenous narratives - and that coming from an artist who had positioned herself with her album Cowboy Carter as a voice of marginalized history. Beyoncé, the first Black woman with a number one country album, was celebrated for her artistic appropriation of a white symbol. But now she is at the center of a debate that could hardly be more painful: Can one reclaim the iconography of the American West as a Black artist without becoming complicit in an imperial narrative?

The Buffalo Soldiers referenced on the T-shirt were units of African American soldiers who served in the US Army after the Civil War. They fought in numerous wars, including against Indigenous peoples and Mexican revolutionaries - on behalf of a state that stole land, destroyed cultures, and used violence as a tool of national unity. Historians like Alaina E. Roberts remind us that there is no progressive interpretation of this legacy if the violence is ignored. Wearing such a T-shirt - especially with an explicit reversal of victim and perpetrator - is not an act of remembrance but a reproduction of nationalist myths. The accusation is serious: Instead of deconstructing colonial history, Beyoncé romanticizes the Western myth as Black empowerment - and leaves the historical victims behind. It is, as TikToker Chisom Okorafor puts it, a signal that Black people too can write themselves into the story of American nationalism - with all its oppression, its wars, its imperial self-righteousness. In other words: those who have been in this country long enough get to speak - everyone else stays out.

But at a time when museums like the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum are beginning to question their own narratives, Beyoncé seems strangely backward-looking. Michelle Tovar, the museum’s director of education, reports that even teaching this history is currently being suppressed in Texas. The political reality calls for nuance, not glorification. Instead, with a single piece of clothing, Beyoncé perpetuates what generations of Native Americans and Mexican communities still experience as an open wound: the erasure of their perspective from public memory. Some of her defenders may argue that Beyoncé didn’t know what she was wearing. But ignorance does not absolve responsibility - especially not when it comes with such visibility. Those who cite history must be aware of its burden. Those who recycle images rooted in colonial violence cannot at the same time claim to stand with the disenfranchised. The case painfully reveals how thin the line is between representation and reproduction - and that even icons can fail when they do not underpin their message with historical consciousness. Beyoncé made history. This time, however, in a way that leaves many of her fans disturbed.