Politics & Power Quote by Peabo Bryson

Peabo Bryson drops this line like a soft indictment wrapped in nostalgia. On paper it sounds like a compliment to Aretha Franklin's reach. Underneath, it reads as an obituary for a certain kind of shared cultural literacy - and a pointed reminder that it took a Black woman of almost unthinkable talent to punch through the country’s racial silos.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “There was a time” signals a loss: not just of Aretha’s era, but of an America where mainstream recognition still had the power to feel like a collective experience. Bryson’s “almost every white person” is a deliberate, slightly uncomfortable metric. He’s not centering whiteness to flatter it; he’s using it as a yardstick for how rare cross-racial canonization is. The subtext is blunt: if whiteness didn’t know you, the culture could pretend you didn’t exist. Aretha was one of the exceptions, and the exception proves the rule.

Context matters. Franklin wasn’t merely a pop star; she was an institution braided into civil rights, gospel tradition, and the politics of respectability and revolt. Bryson is gesturing at a pre-streaming, pre-fragmentation media landscape where radio, TV, and a few gatekeepers could make a Black artist legible to the “general audience” - a euphemism that often meant white.

So the line isn’t just elegy; it’s critique. It asks why that kind of recognition feels historical, what we traded for niche abundance, and why Black greatness still so often needs white familiarity to be treated as national property.