Black is beautiful, black is excellent Black is pain, black is joy, black is evident It's working twice as hard as the people you know you're better than Cause you need to do double what they do so you can level them Black is so much deeper than just African American Our heritage been severed you never got to experiment with family trees Cause they teach you about famine and greed And show you pictures of our fam on their knees Tell us we used to be barbaric, we had actual queens Black is watching child soldiers getting killed by other children Feeling sick like oh shit this could have happened to me Your mummy watching telling stories about your dad and your niece The black are the berry, the sweet of the juice The kid dies, the black are the killer, the sweet of the news And if he's white you give him a chance, he's ill and confused If he's black he's probably armed, you see him and shoot Black is growing up around the barber shop Mummy saying stay away from trouble, you're in yard a lot Studying for ages appreciating the chance you got Cause black is in your blood and you ain't even got the heart to stop Black is stepping in for your mother because your father's gone And standing by your children when you haven't proven karma wrong Black is doing all of the above then going corner shopping Trying to help a lady cross the road to have her walking off Black is growing up around your family and making it Then being forced to leave the place you love because there's hate in it People say you fake the shit, never stayed to change the shit But black is being jealous you'd be dead if you had stayed in it Black is struggling to find your history or trace the shit You don't know the truth about your race cause they're erasing it Black has got a sour fucking flavour, here's a taste of it But black is all I know, there ain't a thing that I would change in it Look, black ain't just a single fucking colour man there's shades to it Her hair straight and thick but mine's got waves in it Black is not divisive, they've been lying and I hate this shit Black has never been a competition, we all make this shit Black is deadly, black is when you're freezing in your home and you can't get sleep But never feeling empty cause you got 20 cousins In your country living stress free, walking for their water daughter Wrapped inside a bed sheet Black is distant, it's representing countries that never even existed While your grandmother was living Black is my Ghanaian brother reading into scriptures Doing research on his lineage, finding out that he's Egyptian Black is people naming your countries and what they trade most Coast of ivory, gold coast and the grain coast But most importantly to show how deep all of this pain goes West Africa, Benin, they call the slave coast Black is so confusing cause the culture they're in love with it They take our features when they want and have their fun with it Never seem to help with all the things we know would come with it Loud in our laughter, silent in our suffering Black is being strong inside the face of defeat Poverty made me a beast, I battled the law in the streets Well you will struggle but your struggle ain't a struggle like me Well how could it be when your people gave us the odds that we beat I mean fucking hell, what about our brothers that are stuck in jail That couldn't bust a bell, they held a burden gotta live with it Black is being guilty until proving that you're innocent Black is saying free my fucking niggas stuck inside the prison cells They think it's funny, we ain't got nothing to say to them Unconditional love is strange to them, it's amazing And black is like the sweetest fucking flavour, here's a taste of it But black is all I know, they ain't a thing that I would change in it