ABSTRACT
Adele’s words marked the first time in pop music history that a white female artist, from the awards show podium, directly addressed a contemporary black woman musician in the prime of her career and publicly expressed humility, heartfelt debt, and a deep and abiding recognition of longstanding influence on her own work. Adele’s globally heard embrace of Beyonce's regality and her pathbreaking iconicity marks that 100-year leap from Tucker’s tacit adoration of black female genius to proudly—if awkwardly—aspiring toward kinship. Delivered with Adele’s trademark brand of sincerity and emotional authenticity, as well as a heaping dose of reverence, such a line is, nonetheless, cringe-worthy to the extent that it, of course, calls up the fraught history of black women imagined as nurturing, service-oriented maternal figures—mothers, maids, and caricatured “mammies”—who were subjugated in captivity to breed against will and—both before and after slavery—to care for children not their own.
