Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy performance answered a century-old question
The 1929 novel that introduced “Blacker the Berry” to America
By Asher Kohn
Last night Kendrick Lamar used one of the biggest stages in the music business — the Grammys — to make a statement about black self-acceptance. He did it by reaching into the Harlem Renaissance and unearthing a book you’ve likely never heard of.
Kendrick Lamar led off with “Blacker the Berry,” a song that takes its title from a 254-page novel about a woman with deep black skin. It was published in 1929 by Wallace Thurman, a black journalist, editor and painter who ran a literary salon out of his Harlem boarding house.
Thurman was 27 when Blacker the Berry was published — the same age as Kendrick Lamar when To Pimp a Butterfly dropped. Thurman’s book followed Emma Lou from Boise to Los Angeles to Harlem, following the life path of Thurman himself. But while the male author was often teased for his dark skin, his female protagonist was brutalized for it. Black men snub her; one tells his friend “I don’t haul no coal.” Employers ignore her applications.
Blacker the Berry ends with a spurned but queenly Emma Lou coming to terms with her own appearance:
What she needed to do now was accept her black skin as being real and unchangeable … and with this in mind begin life anew, always fighting, not so much for acceptance by other people, but for acceptance for herself by herself.
— The Blacker the Berry
What does this have to do with Kendrick Lamar? His Wallace Thurman-referencing track is a statement on the struggle to accept black skin as “being real and unchangeable.” At the end of Monday’s performance, the rapper faced the crowd and TV audiences with no makeup on, with hair napping out of his signature cornrows, and his beard patchy.
The rapper who rhymes about how uncomfortable he feels in his own skin accepted the gaze of a crowd of millions with poise. During the performance, Kendrick Lamar transformed from self-hate to self-acceptance, remixing Blacker the Berry’s 200-plus pages in just six minutes.
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