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originating from White anxieties of revenge from Blacks, which substantiates Stuart Hall’s idea that stereotypes say more about the individual creating them, rather than the subject of the stereotype (Hall 1997, 233). Lamar is able to represent this concept succinctly by rapping, “You hate me don't you? / I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself / Jealous of my wisdom and cards I dealt.” In the continuation of Lamar’s representation of the African American experience, he quietly delivers the lines at the beginning of the song, “Everything black, I don’t need black / I want everything black, I don’t want black”. Within these lines, Lamar shows how institutionalized racism is concealed in 21st century America by exhibiting the contrast between the surface expressions of Black acceptance against the unconscious racism that is still prevalent in America despite the absence of statesanctioned racist practices. Despite all of the oppression the African American community faces from Whites that Lamar raps about in “The Blacker the Berry”, Lamar interestingly notes the prevalence of Black-on-Black violence as part of the African American structure of feeling in both the title and towards the end of the song. The song title, “The Blacker the Berry”, is a reference to an adage and to a novel. The adage, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice” is a phrase meant to induce Black pride and empowerment; that they should not be ashamed of their skin colour. The novel of the same name by Wallace Thurman, depicts discrimination within a Black community, as lighterskinned Blacks are favoured through the phenomenon of colorism. Colorism is the form of prejudice arising from the
differential treatment of those with darker skin tones and can be understood as a subsidiary form of racism (Harvey 1995, 5). In “The Blacker the Berry”, at the beginning of each verse Lamar starts by saying, “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015”, but doesn’t elaborate upon this statement until the final lines of the song where he raps, “So don't matter how much I say I like to preach with the Panthers / Or tell Georgia State ‘Marcus Garvey got all the answers’ / [...] So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?” In these lines Lamar explores the hypocrisy that exists within the Black community resulting from colorism, by first stating pro-African American attitudes, followed by a depiction of Black-on-Black gang violence. It is here where Lamar faced some criticism for appearing to downplay the importance of the mistreatment by police the African American community experiences. However, what Lamar also highlights, is that colorism within the Black community is yet another consequence of historical, systematic oppression and proliferation of Eurocentric ideology, that both complicates and establishes the African American structure of feeling today.
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