Dear Kendrick Lamar,
You recently released a very catchy tune called “The Blacker the Berry” regarding your antipathy towards white people. Mr. Rembert Browne, writer for the popular sports/pop culture website Grantland.com, wrote a response to this song wondering how the villains of your story, whites (or perhaps non-blacks in general), might react to your lyrics. I think that’s a fascinating question, so let’s get right into the “sweeter juices.”
The first thing I notice, Mr. Lamar, is that your conception of the enemy presupposes his incredible strength. I mean, wow, what amazing, near omnipotence the whites of the world possess to “church me with your fake prophesizing that I’mma be just another slave in my head” and “[make] me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga.”
I mean, damn, I can evidently enslave you through the power of my religious suggestions (though as a relatively quiet deist in the vein of Voltaire, I’m not sure what those are) and make a murderer of you with nothing more than, I don’t even know. Perhaps my presence? I had never thought of myself as this kind of demigod, but to conceive of myself in the same terms with which you seem to conceive of “my” people, it sure is empowering. Might I suggest that conceiving of yourself in the opposite terms, the injured mouse in the paws of whitey’s inexorable and infinite power, might be somewhat disempowering for “your” people? Might there not be a better chance of success for oppressed blacks who view whites as normal folks, who can be outcompeted and overcome just like anybody else?
I mean, you do get a villain for the desired comic book morality system and an automatic excuse for failures, and that is comforting. But is that moral clarity more desirable than seeing your enemies for what they actually are? Perhaps that question depends on whether you prefer moral or actual victories. The former are certainly safer.
As for the vileness of your enemies, we find many examples in this gloriously enjoyable song. “You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture, you’re fuckin’ evil I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey, you vandalize my perception but can’t take style from me.”
While I get what you’re going for, Mr. Lamar, I do find a problem or two with the good and evil narrative as constructed. Marcus Garvey, who you admiringly mention as a beacon of black pride in this very song, in a sense got what he wanted. If evil is a property of a racial group, Mr. Garvey’s project to remove the noble, oppressed slaves from white dominated America to black Africa should have ushered in an era of black prosperity and justice. Unfortunately, this fails to explain the immense crappiness of Liberia then and now, including the fact that former slaves, upon arriving in Liberia, enslaved the locals. If, as seems obvious to me, oppression comes from a combination of being weak and easy to distinguish, then both the African enslavement in America and the Liberian clusterfuck make a lot more sense.
Further, I wonder about how sincerely you mean it when you say “you’re fucking evil.” I mean, the first time I saw you, you were sharing a stage with all-white band Imagine Dragons. I saw you the second time whilst you were laughing at Stephen Colbert’s jokes and performing The Colbert Report’s final musical act. Then of course, I accessed both of these performances via the white Sergey Brin’s free to use search engine. It seems that you profit quite a lot from your associations with evil whites like myself. I wonder why Stephen Colbert, the Imagine Dragons and Sergey Brin didn’t vandalize your perceptions or terminate “your” culture.
Perhaps it has something to do with the nature of white privilege. As opposed to black power, with its pride and emphasis on community, whiteness really doesn’t mean anything. As someone who takes advantage of white privilege every chance I get, I can tell you with absolute certainty that whiteness is 100% compatible with both crime and lawfulness, artistry and accounting, liberalism and conservativism. I can be a homosexual, white mob enforcer who enjoys Japanese food, swimming and hip hop and nobody blinks twice. I can be a fire and brimstone pastor calling down damnation on the heretics and nobody thinks it racially odd. I can marry a Korean/Honduran/Indian and nobody calls me a sellout because there’s nothing to sell out.
This is why black/Asian/whatever pride has always confused me. Why do you want a racial identity to constrain you? Why do we fondly remember the white race traitors of yore while black race traitors like Russell Wilson earn revulsion from “their” people? Why on earth, Mr. Kendrick, do you want the little black boys and girls of your neighborhood to, facing the myriad possible ways one might betray the proud black race, enjoy less freedom than I have?
And this bleeds over to another reason why the lyrics of this song bemuse and annoy me, but don’t actually offend me. Whiteness is amorphous, it is almost meaningless. In fact, pretty much the only type of whiteness that has any meaning is the proud whiteness which most people would very much like to avoid. “I’m proud to be white,” since the 1960’s at least, has meant “I’m a trashy, dependent and not very smart person with whom you absolutely don’t want to speak.”
As such, most of us white privilege connoisseurs embrace the amorphousness of white, we glory in the fact that it doesn’t mean anything. Thus, when you attack “fucking evil” white people, it doesn’t really stick to me. Considering the absolute lack of outrage to your song, I’m guessing I’m not unique, either. The annoyance, Mr. Kendrick, comes mostly from the fact you think something as trashy and outdated as a meaningful racial identity applies to me. It’s sort of like a stranger offering you treatment for leprosy – the connotation rather than the query rankles.
I’d like to go back a bit and talk about the desire to destroy black culture we whites have. While I can’t speak for everyone, especially given the meaninglessness of “white,” I have to say that I personally feel no animus towards black culture, I feel sadness. I see black kids who think that success and race treason are synonymous and I thank God I didn’t grow up in that shit. I, living in South Korea, see hip hop culture exported to Asia and cringe. I see two generations of Koreans whose entire exposure to your culture is twerking, Lil’ John and references to marijuana. I feel relieved that I don’t have to explain “we’re not all stoned, promiscuous murder enthusiasts.” I see whites who dress like NWA treated a lot worse than blacks who dress like The Black Keys and I thank heaven nobody pressures me to fit into the former group.
I wonder, Mr. Lamar, if reducing black identity to an amorphous blob of nothing might help more than it hurts. I ask because a lot of what you stand for – the upward mobility, the intellectualism, the writer before rapper shtick – are beautiful things.
Sincerely,
Ben Garrido
