Black Anthems: Who's Gon' Be Alright?

Allusion to The Color Purple

This is an allusion to Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982) and the critically acclaimed film based on the novel of the same name. Lamar takes some creative license here using the word “alls” instead of “all” which was used in both the novel and the film, and of course, adding “nigga” at the end of the address. In The Color Purple, this line is said when Sofia confronts Celie for telling Harpo, Sofia’s husband, to beat her. Here is an extended quote from the novel: “All my life I has to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house…I loves Harpo…God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me” (49-50). Sofia is communicating her long history of abuse by the hands of the Black men in her family. Moreover, she is asserting that she will maintain peace in her own home even if that means killing the man that she loves. Thus, there is an interesting tension that is created when Lamar, a Black man (and in the context of the video a Black man in a group of other Black men), recites a rendering of these words. Clearly Lamar is signifying with Sophia’s message. Like Sophia, Lamar grew up in poverty and surrounded by violence. Alice Walker herself responds positively to Lamar using a quote from her work to communicate his experience as a person of color fighting to survive poverty.
However, the fact remains that the utterance of the words “all my life I has to fight” comes from a specific gendered context; it is an expression of a Black woman’s pain and an insistence to assert agency. Therefore, Lamar’s use of the phrase in a video in which Black women and girls are virtually absent and in a song in which there is very little mention of Black women’s plight effectively detaches them from this iconic expression of pain and resilience.

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