This paper was inspired by Brian Mooney's article, "Why I dropped Everything and Started Teaching Kendrick Lamar's New Album" and the parallels he finds between Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. What I wanted to do was take Mooney's idea and take it a step further by looking at how these two stories overlap and intertwine with one another through a postcolonial reading.
Enjoy.
Abstract
Kendrick Lamar, Toni Morrison, and the Bluest “i”
In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison exposes the ways in which Western white colonizers have created a hegemonic structure within American culture where an individual’s skin color defines the extent of their socially perceived “beauty.” Because it is founded on a racially binary ideology--placing special emphasis on one’s “whiteness” and degrades another’s “blackness”--the American hegemonic structure creates an “us” vs. “them” mentality amongst the public that creates a fight for superiority between white and black individuals. The negative depiction of black Americans that is backed by an ethnically white dominated society grooms people of color from an early age to believe that blackness is the direct cause for their inability to succeed within various aspects of their environment. While beauty is the central conflict in Morrison’s novel, it is evident--to both the reader and the characters within the novel--that the negative reflection of black Americans’ physical features causes a trickle down effect into their place within social classes and internal confrontations with self love.
In addition to Morrison’s novel, I will be using songs from Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album entitled To Pimp a Butterfly, to explore how hegemonic pressures have continuously over time promoted their false ideology of racial division and how it has evolved within our contemporary America. More specifically, I will be using the songs “Complexion (A Zulu Love),” “Wesley’s Theory,” and “i” as a means to reveal the parallels between today’s American cultural view of people of color and how they were depicted in 1941 (the year in which The Bluest Eye is set). I will argue that there is a correlation between the themes of beauty, social class status, and self-hatred being used by the dominant order to perpetuate the notion that people of color are not equals, but the Other. This claim will be supported by discussing such aspects of postcolonial theories as mimicry, hybridity, marxism, cultural materialism, and the power of language.
This paper needed to be written because of the message both Lamar’s album and Morrison’s novel are attempting to promote; black and white people cannot stand by and allow the dominant order to fool them into believing that they are different and not equally afforded the same luxuries within life as one another. We are all part of one race and one race only--the human race. No matter how hard they push us away from one another, people of all complexions need to stand up and support each other in the fight for racial equality. As Lamar famously states on To Pimp a Butterfly, “Complexion, it don’t mean a thing.”
Toni Morrison, Kendrick Lamar, and the Bluest “I”
In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison exposes the ways in which white Western hegemonic forces have created a structure within American culture where an individual’s skin color defines the extent of their “beauty.” Hegemony can be defined as the dominance or control of one group over another. Because it is founded on a racially binary ideology--placing special emphasis on one’s “whiteness” while degrading another’s “blackness”--hegemonic pressures create an “us” vs. “them” mentality within its society that pits white and black individuals against each other as a means to divide them. The negative depiction of black Americans that is perpetuated through this division by an ethnically white dominated society grooms people of color from an early age to believe that blackness is the direct cause for their inability to succeed within various aspects of their environment. While beauty is the central conflict in Morrison’s novel (set in 1941), it is evident--to both the reader and the characters within the novel--that the negative reflection of black Americans’ physical features causes a trickle down effect into their place within social classes and internal confrontations with self love. In his 2015 album entitled To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar explores the ways in which these themes continue to exist and oppress people of color in our present day America. By analyzing Morrison’s novel and Lamar’s songs “Complexion (A Zulu Love),” “Wesley’s Theory,” and “i,” through a postcolonial theorist lens, the correlation of beauty, social class status, and self hatred and their relation to hegemonic influences will reveal themselves as tools being actively and progressively used to portray black Americans as the Other rather than what Lamar and Morrison perceive the two sides to be--equal.
In the section titled “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” within Location of Culture, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha discusses the act of colonial mimicry by those deemed the Other. While the colonized attempt to present themselves in an appearance similar to that of the colonizers, there is still a difference between the two groups. Mimicry is an act used by colonized people as a means for protection from the scrutiny and negative perceptions of the colonizer; however, Bhabha states that the colonized individual should always remember that there must be a gap that exists between who they are and who they are trying to impersonate, “Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask...The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority (Bhabha 88). In order for the colonized to successfully mimic the colonizer, they must be able to be a “subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 86). That is, colonized groups of people should only use the mask of mimicry to conceal themselves from an appearance of the Other but never fully relinquish what makes them unique. In The Bluest Eye, one recognizes the ways in which mimicry both positively and negatively influences the characters Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove.
Claudia MacTeer--the narrator for much of The Bluest Eye--is a young black girl who accurately represents Bhabha’s theory of mimicry. While she is aware that black girls like her sister (Frieda) and friend (Pecola Breedlove) idolize white child stars such as Shirley Temple because of her socially defined “beauty,” Claudia does not allow these ideals to consume her. Claudia expresses her hatred for these ideals through the ways in which she handles white baby dolls--by dismembering them. After taking the doll apart, Claudia reflects on the ways black girls see these dolls in windows of stores and ask themselves, “Awwwww, but not me?” (Morrison 22). This presents the overarching internal dialogue that occurs within many young black women in the novel; they see something that is deemed “beautiful” and do not see a reflection of themselves. The self-hatred that is then internalized by women of color, more specifically Pecola, causes them to fall into a state of madness that feels as though they are unworthy of existing simply because of their skin tone.
Pecola Breedlove--the central character within Morrison’s novel--is a twelve year old black girl who dreams of having blue eyes in hopes that the mask they create will force those around her (both black and white) to see her as beautiful. Because everyone in the community perceives her as ugly and unworthy of love (including her own mother and father), Pecola’s desire to mimic the physical features of her white oppressors does not merely revolve around the need to fulfill their representation of beauty. In her article, “Not So Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in The Bluest Eye” Debra Werrlein claims that Pecola’s desire to alter her eyes is an attempt to erase the vision of “ugliness that is associated with Pecola’s blackness” (Werrlein 67). Blue eyes are a portal to a new world for Pecola; a world where she does not see society as a place of sadness and hate but happiness and love.
The unnamed narrator within chapter three of the novel reinforces this point when she states, “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held pictures, and knew the sights – if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 34). Pecola’s approach to mimicry thus further supports Bhabha's claim that one must attempt to be “similar” but “not quite.” By allowing the gap of separation between self and mimicry to collapse, Pecola allows hegemonic representations of beauty to consume her and therefore causing her to fall into a state of insanity in which she never is capable of crawling out of. The juxtapositioning of Claudia and Pecola forces us to recognize the ways in which the act of mimicry can be both a protective and deceptive tool that can either help or hurt colonized individuals in their pursuit of being accepted by their collective environment.
While Pecola Breedlove approaches the idea of having blue eyes as a means for mimicking white norms of beauty and thus ending her world of suffering, Kendrick Lamar uses his song “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” to reveal the truth behind blue eyed, black children. That is, he questions black children with blue eyes and exposes how these physical features do not always signify an individual’s happy and joyous existence living with oppressive white genetics. On line eighteen Lamar writes, “Brown skinned, but your blue eyes tell me your mama can’t run” as a means to remind his listener of the history of American slavery. The child Lamar is referencing in this line has brown skin and blue eyes; the same blue eyes Pecola wishes she had. Lamar reveals, however, that the child’s “momma can’t run” because she is a slave mistress. Thus, the child is not naturally blue eyed but rather a product of forced hybridity (rape).
The term hybridity is generally understood as taking two different things and combining them with the intent to create something that bridges the two groups together as one. Hybridity within the current context of the term, sadly, represents the forcing of two cultures to combine and become one. In the section “Cutting the Ground” of The Empire Writes Back, authors Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin go further in their description of hybridity:
“[Hybridity is] the potential termination point of an apparently endless human history of conquest and annihilation justified by the myth of group ‘purity,’ and as the basis on which the post-colonial world can be creatively stabilized.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin, 35).
Based on Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s description of the role of hybridity, it is difficult for one to hear Lamar’s song and accept that hybridity somehow creates stabilization amongst ethnic groups. The forced hybridity or rape that exists within “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” in all actuality only further destabilizes the relationship between black and white races. A white slave owner’s raping of an innocent slave woman was not done with the intent to bridge two cultures and erase “purity” from the world. Hybridity was used as both an act of sexually violent oppression and abuse of the woman’s ability to breed free slave workers. If Pecola were to listen to Lamar’s song today, she would be forced to accept the reality that in a white hegemonic society people of color can never win the fight against white oppression, regardless of physical features, because nothing they do will ever fulfill the hegemony’s continuously evolving standards of beauty.
Edward Said states in his groundbreaking work on postcolonial theory, Orientalism, that the “Occident” is defined by what the “Orient” is not (Said 2). The Occident in both Morrison’s novel and Lamar’s song is represented by white norms of beauty: white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. The Orient, contrastingly, is represented by everything else. The objective of “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” is to abolish this binary understanding of cultural beauty that exists in the public discourse of America. Though black women are told that they are the Orient and incapable of fulfilling white norms of beauty, Lamar disagrees with this claim. All people of various shades of skin are equally as beautiful as one another; “complexion don’t mean a thing” (Lamar, line 1).
While whites and blacks continue to rival against one another, Lamar explains in the article “The Oral History of To Pimp a Butterfly,” that “there’s a separation between the light and the dark skin because it’s just in our nature to do so, but we’re all black” (Hale). The universal understanding that every shade of black is one and the same is important for Lamar, but this ideology of love for all complexions has long been rooted within hip hop culture. The phrase “Zulu Love”--which is placed in parentheses so as to give it unique importance--is in and of itself a reference to the Zulu Nation; a hip hop awareness group that was founded in the Bronx, New York during the 1970s by a collection of black gangs (Bambaataa). Their initial objective was to raise cultural awareness amongst the black youth in their area while simultaneously spreading a message of love for all complexions of people. The Zulu Nation was so successful that it is now regarded as being the birthplace of the modern day hip hop culture many Americans love and enjoy.
Racial history in America lies within the subtext of many of Lamar’s lyrics. On line thirty-two of “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” Lamar states that society should “let the Willie Lynch theory reverse a million times.” The Willie Lynch theory was a strategic method used by white Southern slave owners during American slavery in which they pitted light and dark skin slaves against each other as a means to prevent them from banning together and attacking their oppressors (Lynch). Though the Willie Lynch theory is not being used by Lamar in the American slavery sense of the term, he draws a parallel with how it’s foundational objective still proceeds to function within society today. Lamar sees the white norms of beauty that are enforced by the white hegemony as the progressive refixed idea of the slave master, while the pitting of dark and light skinned blacks against each other is still actively being used as a means to keep them from attempting to ban together and advance through different aspects of society (economically, influentially, etc.). By reversing the Willie Lynch theory, these opportunities for advancement will become an equal possibility for all people of color and not specialized for only one specific ethnic group. The implementation of the Willie Lynch theory is a defining moment in America’s history because it is a clear moment in time where society can specifically point to a change in public discourse from the “us” vs. “them” mentality between whites and blacks to a more hierarchal scale that uses complexion as a means to advance or oppress many different shades of people.
Throughout The Bluest Eye it is prevalent that the single implication of one’s shade of skin color is the determining factor in their ability to rise and fall within a community’s social hierarchy. In the chapter “Marxism” within The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, author Glyn Daly discusses Karl Marx’s theory of hierarchy and how every capitalist economy has a power structure (Daly 38). More specifically, Daly states that there are “two fundamental classes” in which capitalism revolves around--the bourgeoisie and the workers/proletariat. The bourgeoisie is the controlling class which monopolizes “everything within life that creates production and subsistence,” while the proletariat class is left to be defined “by their lack of access to means of production.”
Beauty is a form of currency in The Bluest Eye that enriches certain individuals--some more so than others--with the necessary opportunities for advancement. With the majority of the black families described in the novel as existing within the working class of their society (coal miners), the odds of them ever accruing enough financial wealth to advance into the bourgeoise class and beyond is slim to none. Therefore, the only means people of color have for escaping lower tiers of social class is by attempting to fulfill various white hegemonic ideals of success (owning a home, wealth, etc). The cost to represent one’s self as “white” is not cheap, so beauty is something one has to be able to afford. This ultimately creates a conflict between those black individuals who think they exemplify racial advancement against the newly formulated Other (darker toned people) whom they see as inferior. This is most evidently portrayed in The Bluest Eye through the interactions between Maureen Peal and Claudia, as well as between Pecola and Geraldine.
In her description of Maureen Peal, Claudia recognizes (simply by looking at her) the ways in which complexion and class status oppresses girls in her social position:
“A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as the richest of white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me.” (Morrison 23)
Maureen is a “dream child” because she is of a light complexion that frees her from the oppression of her white hegemonic environment. Her yellow skin is a symbol for backwards progress that reveals the hegemony’s influence on black culture has successfully effected them both internally and externally. Claudia, in her typical defiant manner, describes Maureen’s hair as “two lynch ropes” so as to say (as Lamar did in the previously discussed song) the racist history of America is still deeply rooted within the hegemonically “beautiful” black women even if it is not bluntly expressed. The Peal family is representative of the small percentage of black individuals who have escaped the oppression of being labeled Other. The reality, however, is that those who are not graced with a light complexion are trapped by their external beauty (or lack thereof) and never given the chance to advance--thereby creating a division between black haves and have not groups within American social class statuses.
The interaction between Geraldine and Pecola is filled with lots of racial strife despite both women being various shades of the same color. Geraldine looks down on Pecola because she is a middle class woman who values the physical representation of “whiteness,” while Pecola is tattered and ugly due to her family’s low position within their town’s social class. When she sees her beloved cat (who has blue eyes) run in through the front door of her home, Geraldine juxtaposes Pecola’s ugliness side-by-side with the cat’s beauty as a means to expose Pecola and her supposed inferiorities:
Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. They had stared up at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between. (Morrison 92)
The interaction between these two women highlights the foundation for Marx’s argument of a division between the working and bourgeoise class citizens. By influencing them to believe that there is an ideal sector of society in which only those willing to sacrifice their values can infiltrate, middle class black citizens (Geraldine) stand on the shoulders of the inferior (Breedlove family) in hopes that some day they will be accepted by the dominant order into their idolized white culture.
In the chapter “Historicism,” within the Routledge Companion for Critical and Cultural Theory, Simon Malpas describes cultural materialism as seeking to find the “faultlines” in the dominant social order of any given society (Malpas 70). Alan Sinfield, a critical theorist who is cited by Malpas within chapter, states that “despite their power, dominant ideological formations are always in practice, under pressure, trying to substantiate their claim to superior plausibility in the face of disturbance.” Black society is viewed by white hegemonic forces as the disturbance within today’s America, and the faultlines are the avenues in which they can take on their path upward through its social class structure. By withholding opportunities (education, funding poor communities, etc.) that will help people of color advance within their society, white dominant orders become actively involved in making sure that those faultlines do not cause the collapse of their racially oppressive structure and black communities remain the Americanized Other.
During his 2004 standup comedy special For What it’s Worth, Dave Chappelle explains that in a white hegemonic structure the Americanized Other is only afforded two avenues in which they can use to escape the shackles of lower class existence:
“I spoke at my old highschool and I told them kids, straight up, ‘If you guys are serious about getting out of this ghetto, you gotta focus, gotta stop blaming white people for your problems and you've gotta learn....to rap, play basketball, or somethin! Ya trapped...You are trapped! Either do that or sell crack, that's your only option. It's the only way I’ve seen it work!” (Chappelle)
And Chappelle is absolutely right in this understanding of how the American public discourse perceives roles of black Americans through a socio-economic lens. Just as Pecola was sold the lie that blue eyes would change her reality in The Bluest Eye, modern day black Americans are sold the lie that their only means for escaping poverty is not by way of education but by acquiring fame and fortune through their natural abilities. Furthermore, these avenues of financial gain are promoted by the dominant order because they know these professions are breeding grounds for people who are easily exploited for their ignorance surrounding issues of wealth management. Wealthy black Americans who cannot sustain themselves in the upper sectors of the American hierarchal ladder inevitably become a statistic used by white hegemonic forces to substantiate their claim that black individuals do not deserve to stand amongst the white elite.
Because of their lack of education regarding economic positioning and sustainability, Lamar the song “Wesley’s Theory” as a means to educate lower class citizens of the evil influences that attempt to oppress them through manipulation and deceit. Lamar recognizes how his musical talents have afforded him the opportunity to be catapulted out of the working class, far beyond the bourgeoise class, and finally landing him into a position of great wealth and social power. In doing so, however, Lamar has created faultlines within the dominant order’s system of oppression. By gaining so much wealth and becoming an influential voice within American society so quickly, Lamar makes himself a clear target for the dominant order to attack--and he knows it. Lamar is aware that the dominant order will attempt to pull him down and reposition him back into his racially designated social class by any means necessary. If Lamar--or those individuals who follow in his footsteps--are not constantly aware of their presence, the white hegemonic forces will, as he states in the final line of the second verse, “Wesley Snipes yo ass” the very first opportunity they get (line 37).
The title of the song, “Wesley’s Theory,” is a reference to Wesley Snipes--a black American actor who was sentenced to 16 years in prison for tax evasion. Lamar uses Snipes as an example to how white hegemonic forces use black society’s ignorance towards wealth management as a means to oppress them. In an interview with MTV.com writer, Rich Sancho, Kendrick Lamar discusses the record and how it “talks about something we [people of color] weren’t taught in school when we get this money. So, you mean to tell me the moment I become successful and I get this money--and I don’t know how to manage my money--that you’re [the government] gonna throw me back in jail for taxes?” (Sancho).
The dominant order knows that people like Lamar--those who originate from lower social classes--lack the proper education needed to succeed (financially) in today’s world. In a study conducted on former NFL (National Football League) athletes, for example, results showed that “78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress” (Torre). While this does not specifically point to black Americans and their inability to manage their expenses, it does highlight the flaws of gaining wealth through a profession that offers a fast track route to the upper class. Professions like football and basketball exist because white hegemonic forces use the concept of “white collar crime” so as to abuse black Americans and their gullibility as a means to oppress them. White collar crime is typically used to describe a non-violent criminal act that often times involves financial corruption. By springboarding from a very low class standing to a very high class standing, Lamar bypasses any opportunity for gaining an understanding of how to sustain wealth and manage his finances--a factor that will ultimately play a large role in his song’s hypothetical demise.
Through his expressing of how financial ignorance is used to oppress wealthy black Americans, Lamar identifies Uncle Sam as the narrative voice in “Wesley’s Theory” to represent the dominant order and how it attempts to continuously sell him the lie he can spend his riches any way that he pleases and without consequence:
What you want you? A house or a car?
Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar?
Anything, see, my name is Uncle Sam on your dollar
Motherfucker you can live at the mall. (17-20)
Uncle Sam makes money appear to be so abundant within the upper classes of society that there is no need to worry about how Lamar spends; there will always be more money on the way, so why let economics hold Lamar back from having what he has never had?
Uncle Sam continues to remind Lamar that he is aware of Lamar’s “kind” and sarcastically claims that keeping track of receipts is not important because he is already “always following” him anyways (lines 21-7). Thus, Lamar is once again tricked into believing that he can pay Uncle Sam back whenever he wants. By trusting the voice of the dominant order, Lamar is ultimately trapped in a web of financial ruin in which he cannot escape. Because Uncle Sam knew he did not have an “economics” class in his Compton-based school system, Lamar’s ignorance on the subject is used against him. Just as Wesley Snipes’ corrupt tax advisor and accused Ponzi schemer, Ken Starr, was used by federal prosecutors to indict him, white hegemonic forces are often times both the instigator and cause of oppressed peoples’ downfall (Gendar).
The ability to speak is a luxury dominant forces within any capitalist society afford only to those deemed deserving of its power. In the chapter “Structuralism and Semiotics” within the Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, Katie McGowan discusses Ferdinand de Saussure and the power that language has within any one culture:
“Saussure argued instead that language is in fact a primary structure--one that orders, and therefore is responsible for, everything that follows. If this is so, then it seems fairly straightforward that different languages will divide, shape and organize the phenomenal world in different ways.” (McGowan 14)
If language has the capability to alter and manipulate the ways in which society perceives its reality, the subalterns within these societies who are not afforded the ability to speak at all become doubly oppressed. Gayatri Spivak defines in her essay “Righting Wrongs,” that a subaltern is someone dispossessed from upward social mobility (Spivak 531). Therefore, the subaltern is afforded only two avenues of agency in which they can be heard: conform to the white Western culture or allow the dominant order to speak on their behalf. No matter which the subaltern chooses, the former and the latter will ultimately yield the same result. Hegemonic forces will destroy their culture and their identity by taking the languages of the subaltern that fall in line with their ideologies and perpetuate the notion that the subaltern is the Other. As the subaltern is progressively withheld from the ability to speak, their need to outwardly express their oppression spills out and onto their own people.
Because language is used by the dominant order to tell them what beautiful is/is not, as well as the extent of their social mobility up the hierarchical ladder of their society, black characters in The Bluest Eye develop an internalized self-hatred that corrupts how they perceive their value as human beings. The inability to love oneself is prevalent throughout Morrison’s novel, but it is never more apparent than in the story of Pecola Breedlove and her tumultuous upbringing. While her mother (Polly Breedlove) hates her because her skin was not light enough to free their family from poverty, her father (Cholly Breedlove) rapes and incestually impregnates her due to his own self-hatred and need to express his sexual oppression.
The absence of love within her own home--along with the negative language used towards her by everyone in her environment--causes Pecola to develop her own internal self-hatred that stems from a sense of inferiority that has caused her family’s poverty stricken existence. Pecola only knows of love as it is expressed towards the white child stars she sees on television and on the candy she buys at her town’s local candy store. This is why in chapter three of The Bluest Eye Pecola (literally) attempts to consume love in an effort to soothe her internal self-hate: “She eats the candy, its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane” (Morrison 33). Because they only know love as being afforded to those deemed worthy of its presence, black Americans like Pecola are internally distorted by the notion that they cannot love themselves.
Kendrick Lamar’s song “i,” can be described as the subaltern’s attempt to not only speak back to their oppressor but also challenge language and how it is used to negatively influence how they perceive themselves. In an interview with NPR.org, Lamar discussed the meaning behind To Pimp a Butterfly: “The message I'm sending to myself — I can't change the world until I change myself first” (NPR Staff). This is never more apparent within the album than in the song, “i.” Lamar discusses in the first verse of the song how “they” (white oppressive forces) are trying to make them (black society) believe that the world is falling out from under them:
They wanna say it’s a war outside, bomb on the street
Gun in the hood, mob of police
Rock on the corner with a line for the fiend
And a bottle full of lean and a model on the scheme. (1-4)
Every one of these lines present a different sign that signifies negative aspects of a black community. Hegemonic pressures are using language as a means to negatively depict Lamar’s black community through sensationalized news stories. If the world sees black people and their environment as full of fighting and drugs, people of color will have no choice but to accept these depictions as being truthful of their reality. Language no longer needs to be used to tell the world that this is how it is, because now black society has accepted it as their role within society. Lamar, however, counters this notion when he states that as the evils of Lucy (the white man) continue to try and hold him down, he will continue to fight and say “look at me mother fucker I smile” (Lamar, line 10).
While Spivak claims that the subaltern is withheld from all means of social mobility, Lamar’s presence--not only musically but socially as well--reveals that the black American subaltern has created its own voice through the avenue of rap music. Being that it was founded on the need to verbally express poor black American’s everyday struggles as an oppressed people, rap music how the subaltern can finally be properly represented through a language that fulfills how they perceive their reality to exist. The song “i” then becomes a battle cry for black Americans to love themselves for who they are and not what the hegemony tells society they are meant to signify. One would hope that if Pecola Breedlove were alive today, the hook of “i” would help her realize that she too is both capable and deserving of being loved by herself and her environment:
And (I love myself)
When you lookin’ at me, tell me what do you see?
(I love myself)
Ahh, I put a bullet in the back of the back of the head of a police
(I love myself)
Illuminated by the hand of God, boy don’t seem shy
(I love myself)
One day at a time, the sun gon’ shine. (11-19)
The process for acquiring love, however, has to start from within. Just as Lamar cannot change the world until he changes himself, black and white America needs to realize that the only way to reverse the cycle of racism within this country is by externally expressing how they feel about the man in the mirror--absent of any ideology that one race is superior to another. Society must accept the reality that both blacks and whites are human beings equally deserving of a happy and successful existence.
At the end of the live version of “i” that concludes To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar discusses discursive language and how it is used against people of color as a means to substantiate the white hegemonic ideology that black Americans are the Other. In an open dialogue with the recently raucous crowd, Lamar asks them to stop fighting one another and realize the short time they have left. This snowballs into a discussion on how the phrase, “Fuck Nigga” reinforces the oppressive connotations of the word, “Nigger” (Lamar, line 70). Instead, Lamar insists that black people start using the word as it was initially meant to be pronounced and defined, “negus: King==used as a title of the sovereign of Ethiopia; antonym--nigger” (Negus).
Lamar uses the conclusion of “i’ and its acapella outro to expose these recurring ideas on how hegemonic ideological philosophies have altered society’s understanding of language and words to continuously divide and manipulate the ways in which people of color exist within an oppressive white society:
The history books overlook the word and hide it
America tried to make it to a house divided
The homies don’t recognize we been using it wrong
So I’ma break it down and put my game in the song
N-E-G-U-S, say it with me
Or say no more (80-86)
Lamar’s conclusion to the song leaves both his listeners and (more specifically) his fellow black Americans to choose which side of the fight they want to stand on: stop using the term, “nigger” and help the world rid itself of hate and discrimination, or continue to perpetuate the connotations of the word and watch the world burn with it. The only way people can start to love themselves is by changing the way they speak and see themselves--it all starts from within.
Since the inception of “race” as a term used to define them, blacks and whites have rivaled against one another in their fight for superiority. What Morrison’s novel and Lamar’s album serve to offer these two groups is a message of love for all people with varying complexions and physical features. Human beings were not meant to be defined by their beauty; a word so marred and abused by the dominant order that it no longer is a term of uniqueness but an ideology of hate. Human beings were not meant to be classified by their access to wealth--prioritizing one group over another as to offer better quality of life. Human beings were put on this earth to live, love, and evolve with one another as they made the world a better place. By allowing the dominant orders to tell them they are defined by their differences, the human race (and the world as a whole) will continue to be a place of hate and destruction that eventually will lead to mankind’s own demise. People of all complexions need to reverse the cycle of racism that has riddled their history and work towards loving themselves and those around them; to see each other not as the other but as the equal.
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