Pop superstar Beyonce was the highest-paid female singer in 2017, according to Forbes, piling up a whopping $105 million in gross income. Her dad and former manager, Mathew Knowles, attributes that success to her skin color. That is to say, he feels that the only reason she is so famous is because she isn’t too black.

In an interview with Ebony magazine, Knowles said, “When it comes to black females, who are the people who get their music played on pop radio? Mariah Carey, Rihanna, the female rapper Nicki Minaj, my kids [Beyonce and Solange], and what do they all have in common?”

“They’re all lighter-skinned,” the interviewer answered.

“Do you think that’s an accident?” Knowles asked rhetorically.

Not a lot of “respect” for black music history in that racist statement, huh, Aretha?

Knowles was also asked to account for the “colorism” he’s experienced in his life and the resulting comments were just as charged:

When I was growing up, my mother used to say, “Don’t ever bring no nappy-head Black girl to my house.” In the deep South in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the shade of your Blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message.

I have a chapter in the book that talks about eroticized rage. I talk about going to therapy and sharing–one day I had a breakthrough–that I used to date mainly White women or very high-complexion Black women that looked White. I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was White. Later I found out that she wasn’t, and she was actually very much in-tune with her Blackness.

I had been conditioned from childhood. With eroticized rage, there was actual rage in me as a Black man, and I saw the White female as a way, subconsciously, of getting even or getting back. There are a lot of Black men of my era that are not aware of this thing.

It’s all there in Knowles’ new book, Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, aka, “I’m still justifying my own racism.”

Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, et. al. not withstanding, Knowles is further proven to know nothing with this little factoid: 2017, the year his "light-skinned" daughter got even richer, rap and hip-hop overtook rock and roll as the most popular music in the United States for the first time ever. That just so happens to be a genre dominated by those with plenty of melanin in the epidermis. But acknowledging the contributions of black people to music won't sell as many books, now, will it, Mr. Knowles?