From Du Bois to Lamar

“Lock our bodies but can’t trap our minds!” he would shout later, jumping freely around the stage. “Trap our bodies but can’t lock our minds!”



Lamar launched into a searing attack, rapping the entire first verse of his song “The Blacker the Berry,” the subtext of each shared lyric making clear the otherwise unnamed object of his rage: white supremacy. And in those moments, when Lamar first spoke, between the force of the words and the force of the beat, his entire body jolted as if struck by lightning, as if lit up with a police Taser, as if volts of force rushed through him, froze him in place, then rushed through him again. This, too, orchestrated to reveal the deeper meaning of his lyrics to come: that the secondary status of black bodies is comprehensive, exhaustive, systematic, shocking one’s entire system, jolting, seizing.

The deeper meaning of the lyrics to come—their subtext played out by the drama on the stage—is part of a rich tradition, the continuance of a conversation with some of the earliest black protest writers.

Been feeling this way since I was 16, came to my senses

You never liked us anyway, fuck your friendship, I meant it

I’m African-American, I’m African

I’m black as the moon, heritage of a small village

Pardon my residence

Came from the bottom of mankind

My hair is nappy, my dick is big, my nose is round and wide

You hate me don’t you?

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

And this is more than confession

I mean I might press the button just so you know my discretion

I’m guardin’ my feelings, I know that you feel it

You sabotage my community, makin’ a killin’

You made me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga [1]

That’s a lot to unpack: disillusionment and resolve; countering negative messaging about black bodies and heritage; acute awareness of racial hatred against black life and culture; threats of vengeful action arising from the pressures of racial prejudice; recognizing the calculated hand of systematic racism in the destruction of black communities… A lot under that hood for sure.

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This lineage predates black protest writer W.E.B. Du Bois’s loosely linked essays in The Souls of Black Folk, but that is where I first began digging all those months ago. Though subtext permeates Du Bois’s collection, it’s in the short story “Of the Coming of John”—the tale of two Johns, childhood friends from a rural Southern town, one white, one black—that the sub-textual tricks are especially powerful. Both characters are going to college, celebrated and encouraged by their families, but the whites of the town discourage the education of black John.

“It’ll spoil him, – ruin him,” they said. “And they talked as though they knew,” Du Bois, the narrator of this sole fictional piece in the book, tells us.

The blacks of the town are so excited that “full half the black folk followed [their black John] proudly to the station, and carried his queer little trunk and many bundles. And there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and the boys clapped him on the back.”

But, as the whites of the town, proud of their white John and all his possibilities (perhaps he can return and become governor, or mayor, or something more), shake their heads at the foolishness of the black excitement about the black John, the blacks cannot contain their excitement about their John’s eventual return.

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