Song Analysis: Black Stacey By Saul Stacey Williams

“Black Stacey” is an autobiographical song written by Saul Stacey Williams. It reflects on how his childhood experience and personal insecurities were influenced by peer discrimination, and how he eventually embraced his own skin color. The song’s additional purpose is also to advocate for other musicians to speak on their own struggles with racial self-acceptance and skin color. Williams depicts how he was insecure about his color. He was dark-skinned, darker than anyone else at his high school. Thus, he got the nickname “Black Stacey”, Stacey being his middle name and the name that he was known to his peers by. Due to this nickname, he was always defined by his physical appearance, and even his personality, and the insecurity …show more content…
He often daydreamed about having everyone flatter and commend his lighter skin once he had bleached it. His peers were proud of their ancestors being raped by their white masters so that they could get the Caucasian gene and have relatively lighter skin. This is how much light skin was valued amongst them. Having such a contrasting color, this served to further bolster Williams’s racial insecurities. The repetition in the following lines “They say "You're too black man", I think I'm too black, Mom, do you think I'm too black? I think I'm too black, I think I'm too black, I think I'm too black, You're black, you're black, you're black, you're black” displays the obsession with which these thoughts about his skin had grown to overtake Williams’s mind. Since his dark skin was apparently all that was worth acknowledging about Williams, he decided to turn it into a weapon of sorts, a comical factor. “So it was clear on every level I was blacker than you”. He began to offset his insecurity by turning his dark skin color into a competition, by trying to “out-black” everyone, and that too “on every