Anyone looking at or listening to the album Lemonade can tell that it’s full of pain.
It's clear from the look on Michael Brown's mother’s face as she holds up her son’s graduation photo to the magic of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Or with the first words Beyoncé sings in “Pray You Catch Me,” which opens the album: “You can taste the dishonesty/It’s all over your breath.” The album’s pain is a full body experience. You can see it, feel it, even taste it. Beyoncé’s all-encompassing pain conveys something we can all relate to: not feeling good enough, not feeling attractive enough, just not feeling like enough. Many have speculated after hearing this album that Jay-Z cheated on Beyoncé with someone she refers to as “Becky with the good hair”. A lot of the songs on poetry on this album are about feeling used, betrayed, and unloved. This is something everything at some point, and the pain here comes from loving something so much that it tears you apart, even though the thing you love is the thing hurting you.
Some of this pain on the album, however, is not something everyone can relate to. I alluded to this earlier when I mentioned Mike Brown’s mother; a lot of the pain on this album is a result of what it’s like to be a Black person, not just in America, but in the world as a whole. The climate of the world is shifting. Race is everywhere you look, from the presidential election, to the Black Lives Matter movement, to the NUDivest campaign.
For me, this topic of race has always been personally relevant. I am mixed, half Black and half white. A personal point of connection with this visual album is when I compare my mother’s pale skin and blue eyes with my tan skin and hazel eyes but see our similarities and think, “You desperately want to look like her. You look nothing like your mother. You look everything like your mother.” Being mixed is somewhat of an identity crisis, especially at Northwestern.
Despite going to racially diverse schools all my life, including Northwestern, whose population was only 39.5% white as of the 2014-2015 school year, I have always been made painfully aware of my split existence, because a mixed race life is not a common experience. During the 2014-2015 school year, only 3.5% of Northwestern identified as being of two or more races. Since coming here, I’ve noticed that one of the first questions I am asked when meeting someone is, “What are you?” and when I tell them, many try to figure out which of my parents is the Black one. It’s important to note that they don’t ever ask who is white. People wonder why I’m not a part of NUDivest or wasn’t at the Black House rally, but then get uncomfortable when I talk about my father living in the Cabrini-Green housing projects, or mention some of the rap songs I listen to. I’m supposed to be Black, but also white. I’m supposed to embrace my “culture,” whatever that means, but am also constantly reminded by others that “I’m the whitest Black person they know.” I often have to choose to be one thing or pretend that I’m nothing. Our current society is pushing towards equality, but we are not there yet. We tell ourselves that our race does not matter, but are forced to confront and present it regularly. In this current society, a mixed person like me can’t help but agree with Beyoncé and think, “the past and the future merge to meet us here. What a fucking curse.”
Earlier, I said that this album and its accompanying visual masterpiece contain a lot of pain. A lot of pain that comes with being a person of color, and Lemonade reflects that. However, this album sends a lot of love for people of color as well. In Lemonade, we are told, through a beautiful combination of lyricism, poetry, colors, geography, culture and history, that we are not cursed anymore. We can move past all of this. Mixed people like me don’t have to feel like they should only love half of themselves. A Southern woman featured on the album is heard saying, “So how are we supposed to lead our children to the future? What do we do? How do we do that? Love. l-o-v-e love.” This love, like the pain, is universal. It is love for people who have wronged us, love for a world that has continually condemned us and love for the people who look everything or nothing like us.
This album is empowering, not just to women or even just to Black people, but people of all races, colors, shapes and sizes. A big part of love is appreciation and acceptance, and in this album, Beyoncé is teaching us to love and accept each other and ourselves for our skin colors, our pasts, our bodies and everything else that makes us, us. My minority status is something you know as soon as you look at me, even if you can’t quite put a name to it. Moving past the fact that this physical feature is out of my control, listening to Lemonade has made me realize that not only can I not pretend this part of me does not exist, I shouldn’t. I should embrace who I am and what I look like because that’s never going to change. People of color or mixed descent are always going to feel how I have felt, and that won’t change unless I love myself. In order to lead our children into the future, past all of this self-hate and self-repression, we have to love ourselves and each other. As we move into the future at Northwestern, especially as the the class of 2020 promises a higher percentages of students of color and low-income students than ever before, this unconditional love of diversity will become even more critical.
While Beyoncé was just reacting to a woman looking good and walking into a club in her song “6 Inch,” the same statement applies to how I felt after watching this video album last Saturday night: “Goddamn, she murdered everybody and I was her witness.”
Watch the trailer for Lemonade below. Listen to the album in its entirety for free on BBC's Radio 1. Stream is available for the next 27 days (album starts at 1:02:40).