Our season long analysis of To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar continues with the album’s thirteenth track “The Blacker the Berry.”
The song was the album’s second single and released amidst the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s incredibly potent, packed with references to the historic oppression of the black community, race relations in contemporary American society, police brutality, the US penitentiary system, and the complexities of black identity, among many others.
Central to “The Blacker the Berry” is an idea known as “double-consciousness.” Coined by writer W.E.B. Du Bois, double-consciousness describes the internal conflict experienced by the oppressed groups living in an oppressive society (see: black people in white America). Du Bois argued that attempting to reconcile your African heritage while being raised in a white European-dominated society posed psychological challenges. In his book The