Beyoncé’s impeccable Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday drew an estimated 104 million viewers, but members of the National Sheriffs’ Association were not among them. Gathered in Washington, D.C., for their annual legislative meeting, the members of the organization, which is tasked with improving police professionalism, turned off the TV set midgame when the superstar performed part of her new single, “Formation.”

The association’s president told The Washington Examiner about this petty boycott, stating that the cops were angered that the NFL permitted the performance of what is, in their view, an anti-police song. Meanwhile, on Fox News, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani agreed. “I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers,” he said of the show.

Had Beyoncé actually used an enormous televised spectacle to attack police, I would have welcomed it. There should be no limit to the censure leveled at an institution drenched in racist violence that kills black teen males at a rate 10 times higher than their white peers. But she did not attack the police. She paid homage to black power and black life. Dancers clad in black berets raised their fists in fierce formation, recalling the salutes of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.

While Beyoncé tapped the recognizable iconography of historic black struggle and anger, she hardly recited the Black Panther Party’s 10 point program. Needless to say, she is no radical Panther; she supports Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and dines with President Barack Obama. Beyoncé is, however, becoming a symbol of black strength. It is no small thing that police institutions, Giuliani and numerous regressive Tweeters responded to powerful blackness by calling its very invocation an attack on police.

Let’s turn to the details of her latest song, its politically charged video and her Sunday night performance, which have all left police feeling embattled. In her show she referred to historic black struggle largely through her dancers’ uniforms and salutes. In her “Formation” video, riot cops raise their hands (“Hands up, don’t shoot” style) to a dancing black little boy in a hoodie. Writing on a wall reads “Stop shooting us,” and she sits atop a half-sunk New Orleans police cruiser, which, tellingly, eventually sinks and pulls her down with it.

The song is a paean to Southern blackness. Lyrics include “I like my baby hair, with baby hair and Afros” and “I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making.” Police are not mentioned at all. The extent of Bey’s “attack” was a simple reference to American police officers shooting black people, symbolized by a young hooded black child. These are facts, not contentions — but facts that the sheriffs’ association would rather you not hear or see.

An institution that reads the mere mention of its very violent flaws as an affront is incapable of reform. Those who see Beyoncé’s allusions to police racism as an attack on policing unwittingly assert that this racism is an essential and representative part of policing. They elide critiques of racist police violence with critiques of all police. It is they who call a hoodie-clad dancing black child a danger to policing, hauntingly echoing the police’s assertion that 12-year-old Tamir Rice presented a threat enough to justify a shot in the stomach.