Photo by KMazur via IMDB
When I wrote about Justin Timberlake’s fraught relationship with Black women a year ago, I thought I’d said it all.
I detailed Timberlake’s long history with Black women in his professional and personal lives. I argued that because of that history, if Timberlake was “canceled,” it better be because Black women said so. I mourned the loss of many millennial Black women’s first celebrity crush.
Frankly, I didn’t think anyone would care. Not about any facet of a fading pop star, and certainly not about Timberlake’s public image vis-à-vis Black women.
Well, in the last year, one of these has proven to be true.
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To my surprise, the recent discourse on Timberlake has reached 2000s Total Request Live-level mania. To my dismay, Black women continue to be left out the conversation.
It all started with 2021’s Super Bowl Sunday. Since 2016, there has been a call every Big Game for Timberlake to apologize to Janet Jackson for his role in their infamous 2004 halftime show performance. Jackson’s career flatlined after the scandal, while Timberlake’s flourished.
Timberlake never responded to the cries of #JusticeforJanet. He’d usually keep a low profile for a while and reappear for promotion of a new film or musical project later in the year.
2021 suggested the same course of events. That is, until two hours after the Super Bowl when The New York Times released its 75-minute documentary Framing Britney Spears.
For two minutes total, the documentary criticizes Timberlake, who dated Spears in the early 2000s, for slut-shaming her to propel his music career. Under a different context, a reaction so immense to a two-minute performance would have earned Timberlake an Oscar nomination. Instead, the public raked Timberlake through the coals for seven days straight. Some social media users even demanded he and his family suffer great bodily harm or die.
On February 12, 2021, a day that will live in infamy in my Timberlake ethnographic study, Timberlake issued a public apology to Spears and Jackson. He, Spears, and Jackson were trending on Twitter for the next few days, and everyone—from Timberlake fans and haters to folks who had never heard of him, had not known that he dated Spears, or had no knowledge of 2004’s Super Bowl Halftime Show—had an opinion.
I consumed it all…for research.
Most of the takes on Timberlake’s apology centered on Spears or Timberlake’s alleged cultural appropriation. Missing among all the thinkpieces, thoughts, and feelings on Timberlake’s apology was anything about Timberlake’s relationship with Black women. Guess how many of the thinkpieces, thoughts, or feelings in major publications were authored by Black women?
The lack of Black women’s vantage point on the issue is curious. After all, Timberlake’s apology was addressed in part to a Black woman and referenced racism and misogyny. (I am guessing neither Timberlake nor his publicist know the term misogynoir.) And, Timberlake fell out of public favor partly because of his actions towards a Black woman.
So, I am back where I started. Yearning for a public conversation that centers Black women.
The conversation would go something like this.
When it comes to “canceling” celebrities, I only want to hear from people who had stakes in the matter to begin with. For Timberlake, those people fall into two categories: one, Janet Jackson, and two, Timberlake’s Black woman fans. These are the groups to whom Timberlake is accountable. For everyone else, the stakes could not be any lower.
As for Janet, she told us in her recent 2022 documentary to lay off Timberlake. No one is listening to her. Even worse, it has been insinuated that she must have been pressured to make a statement absolving him of any wrongdoing. I can think of no greater insult to Jackson and her legacy than to suggest she was not in control of every aspect of her own documentary and, at 50 years in the business, her own career. According to Jackson, that was the point of the documentary: to tell her story her way with her words.
As for Timberlake’s Black women fans, we are admittedly all over the place, but I haven’t seen one take in the media that asks for our opinions or legitimately cares what we think.* I don’t know what to do with the irony that the cancellation of Timberlake for mistreating a Black woman is itself mistreating Black women. Or that not even the Black woman at the center of the apology is being heard.
Whether Timberlake is canceled is not the point. Interrogating who gets to cancel him and why is the point. It’s a microcosm for a societal issue: Black women create a culture, are the only ones genuinely invested in it, and who stand to lose something when it’s gone, and yet they are never given credit or consulted when the public has decided to move on. It’s the story of discarding Black women, and it’s an old ass story.
A non-Black woman in one of my Facebook groups started her thoughts on Timberlake’s apology with an apt preamble: “I speak with Black women and not for them.” Others who want to comment on the topic should make a similar qualification. And then ask themselves, is it my voice that needs to amplifying? Is there any group of people whose voices need to be heard instead of mine?
If we can dismantle or at least disrupt misogynoir when it comes to an inconsequential pop star, maybe it can be done on less trivial matters like universal healthcare, livable wages, housing security, and reproductive rights. Let’s start practicing now.
*I would be remiss if I didn’t say what I, a Black woman and recovering Timberlake fan, think about the events of last year. Since nobody asked, I’ve kept it to five brief points:
1. In my view, there is no statute of limitations on apologies while the apologizer and the subject of the apology are still alive.
2. I have no interest in a line-by-line analysis of Timberlake’s apology in search of eloquence or sincerity. Any celebrity or publicist can write an award- or cringeworthy apology. Celebrity apologies are often both. I retired from judging celebrity apologies when the late Kobe Bryant went on a four-year press tour to undo nearly every part of his seemingly sincere apology for sexual assaulting a woman a decade earlier.
3. I did not expect Timberlake to ever publicly apologize to Jackson, given the demonstrated lack of consequences for remaining silent. So, I appreciate that he did.
4. Anyone calling for Timberlake’s cancellation should be sure that their past statements are free of support for him, when he hadn’t apologized to anyone and was on the top of the charts, selling out tours, and writing and producing for top artists. Fair-weather cancellers are just as bad as fair-weather sports fans.
5. I look forward to seeing specifically how Timberlake will, in his words, “do better.”
Ofelia Brooks is a Black, Latiné, first-generation writer and lawyer. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Catapult, Cutleaf, Podcast Review, and Drunk Monkeys. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @ofeliabrooksesq and at ofeliabrooksesq.com.