Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, Black Fathers, and White Women

The first time I realized my Dad was Black was also the first time he took me out alone in public. I was six. The doors slid open and his spine straightened as we walked into the movie theater. Almost immediately I felt the blinding light of the public gaze and wanted to cover my face. People were noticing the blonde white kid with the Black man. Their expressions ranged from bewilderment to concern.

When it was our turn to buy tickets, the teller asked me which movie I wanted to see rather than addressing the person who was paying for it. His eyes flicked from me to Dad, searching my face for some explanation. I was confused by the authority he had hung around my neck. Didn’t he see the adult beside me? 

It took me a while to connect that heavy feeling of being watched with race. As a white kid in a small white town, I had never needed to contend with my whiteness. Although I didn’t have any words for it, race became a source of unspoken discomfort when I went out with my family. Once, I introduced my step-sister as “my sister” to a classmate and he stared at us for a long time before saying, “But she can’t be your real sister.” I got in trouble with my parents for confessing that she wasn’t. 

“Zoe has a Black Dad,” my friends would announce to anyone who didn’t know me. They made it sound as strange and exciting as having a jacuzzi or a pet iguana. I wasn’t sure if I should be proud or defensive. I usually smiled at the floor and hoped for no follow-up questions, which ranged from asking whether he was “cool,” to asking whether he smoked weed, to implying that he abused us. 

I haven’t talked to Dad in over a year, so I can’t ask him what he thinks about the new Kendrick album. Rap used to be our way of speaking about things that we’d previously been unable to address, especially race. I remember coming home from my first year of university and discussing J. Cole and feminism with him. In the end he said, “Finally you’re listening to good music.” 

Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is groundbreaking. The album acts as a feminist blueprint for how we can begin to deconstruct harmful alpha-male masculinity in Black families. It breaks taboos by exploring men’s Daddy issues, sexual harm, therapy, and intimacy, and unravels the usual methods Black men use to escape trauma. I see my Dad, brothers, uncles, and cousins in this album. But I also see myself – both as the child carrying the weight of a parent’s historical and racial trauma, and as the white female object.

If Dad and I were talking now, I might gently point out the moments in Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers when I can relate to what Kendrick says about being raised by a Black man. If we had an entirely different relationship, I might ask what he thinks about how the album weaves women through its narrative and why Dad chose to marry two white women himself. If I was even braver I might ask how the album makes him think about his ways of grieving and whether he grieves his separation from me and his other children.

I see my Dad, brothers, uncles, and cousins in this album. But I also see myself – both as the child carrying the weight of a parent’s historical and racial trauma, and as the white female object.

Worldwide Steppers

While Kendrick’s other albums deal with more direct forms of violence, such as police brutality, murder, and gang violence, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers reflects on the covert ways people harm each other. The third song on the album, “Worldwide Steppers” alternates between moments of tenderness and violence, personal and political issues, to show how the systems we uphold inadvertently turn us into murderers. 

I’m a killer, he’s a killer, she’s a killer, bitch
We some killers, walkin’ zombies, tryna scratch that itch

The first verse of the song explores who Kendrick is and what matters to him – his children, legacy, and personal growth. He has concluded that he’s a killer by looking inwards at his own destructive patterns and attempting to heal them. He then pivots to a memory of his first time having sex with a white girl and his relationships with white women. The song subsequently expands from the personal to the universal with examples of the indirect ways people kill each other: the media kills consciousness, sensitivity kills freedom of speech, and corporations, churches, Hollywood, and schools can be killers too. By participating in these systems we cannot escape the harm they cause and have to take responsibility for it to heal.

Sciatic nerve pinch, I don’t know how to feel
Like the first time I fucked a white bitch

The verse about having sex with white women seems out of place between the other two. How does it connect to the idea that we are all responsible for harming and indirectly killing each other? To me, this verse is Kendrick’s case study for exploring where personal harm and political violence intersect. 

She drove her daddy’s Benz
I found out he was a sheriff
That was a win-win
Because he had locked up Uncle Perry
She paid her Daddy’s sins

The first white girl he has sex with is wealthy; her family directly benefits from the same carceral system that has harmed members of Kendrick’s family. Kendrick views sex as a means to extract payment from her father, which means he doesn’t see her as human. Their sexual connection cannot undo the system of white supremacy she benefits from; it also fails to undo the patriarchal systems that allow him to see her as a sex object. He objectifies her as she objectifies him, turning them both into “killers”.

Three of Dad’s four brothers have also married white women. The majority of my cousins are biracial. But when Dad’s side of the family gets together, the culture shifts away from whiteness. He and his siblings speak patois, cook Jamaican food, and play reggae. It’s one of the rare times when I’ve seen him loosen into complete ease. When the food is ready, Dad and his siblings heap everyone’s plates with red beans and rice, jerk chicken and beef patties. Only one local shop does the patties properly– piping hot, spicy, and with lots of meaty filling, which drips down your hands if you aren’t careful. The white women wives, whose culture dominates in almost every other space, fade into the periphery. 

It didn’t occur to me to find it strange that the Black men in our family seemed to pursue white women almost exclusively until I read Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) in my first year of university. In the chapter, “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” Fanon argues that Black men pursue white women because they want to experience what it’s like to be white: “By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man … I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine,” (63). 

But does that make the men in my family inadvertent “killers” in Kendrick’s definition? Is there a way for Black men to see white women as a means to access whiteness without objectifying them? And is there a way for white women to escape perpetuating racism while participating in interracial relationships? 

White supremacy and patriarchy don’t allow us to fully escape being killers, whether we objectify or truly love the people we’re involved with. But interracial relationships aren’t the cause of harm; instead, they’re fraught spaces where the systems of power that turn us into killers clash against our ability to love. They can be sites for uprooting those systems within ourselves, or at least seeing them with greater urgency and empathy.

But it would also be naïve to suggest that interracial relationships are a solution to those killer-creating systems. White supremacy and patriarchy are pervasive in my family. Sometimes those systems succeed at undoing love and make it impossible for families to remain together. Couples split up and become ugly to each other; children and parents abandon one another; members of the family leave and don’t come back. That painful separation lives inside the bodies of myself, my cousins and siblings, fracturing our sense of security and self. 

Is there a way for Black men to see white women as a means to access whiteness without objectifying them? And is there a way for white women to escape perpetuating racism while participating in interracial relationships?

As a white woman raised in a Black family, I can see white supremacy within myself and the people around me in ways other white people might not. People who don’t know my history can’t see my family in my skin color, so feel comfortable enough to say and do racist things in front of me without expecting any backlash. The same police officer who would murder my little brother would probably assume my innocence. Sometimes I feel like I’m also wearing a white mask as I reap the full benefits of white privilege and witness the harm it causes to the people I love most. But underneath the mask is the inescapable truth: I’m a killer too. 

Father Time

“Father Time”, the fifth song in the album, explores Kendrick’s frameworks for understanding masculinity through his relationship with his father and other men. The song begins with a woman’s voice, Sampha, telling Kendrick, “You really need some therapy.” He replies, “Real n**** need no therapy, fuck you talkin’ about?” After some firm convincing, the song travels into a therapy-like confession where Kendrick unpacks his childhood and his father’s lessons about masculinity. It explores how poverty and patriarchy intersected during Kendrick’s childhood, causing him to see competitiveness and lack of emotion as survival methods. His father pushes him to the limit in an attempt to make him successful, teaching him that masculinity and competition are ways of overcoming his marginalization. 

Mama said, that boy is exhausted, he said, go fuck yourself
If he give up now, that’s gon’ cost him, life’s a bitch
You could be a bitch or step out the margin, I got up quick

Although I’m my Dad’s least athletically gifted child, he still insisted on teaching me how to shoot and dribble a basketball properly, as well as the basics of almost every other sport. He also taught me how to ride a bike and we used to go for long bike rides on hilly country roads. My legs burned and sweat poured down my face but I refused to complain and never asked to go home. Tears were not tolerated; if me or my siblings were hurt, we were told to “rub it,” which he said so often that it became an inside joke in our family. When my mom tried to intervene and disrupt the lessons Dad was teaching, especially with my youngest brother, she was told to stay out of it. 

Kendrick’s father desperately attempts to prepare him for the systems that will prevent his success, breaking his humility “just for practice” so he’s better able to survive and persist. While his methods do help Kendrick become successful, they’re also harmful. Kendrick’s father rarely tells him he loves him. He can’t show physical or emotional pain, “cause if I cried about it, he’d surely tell me not to be weak.” He is taught not to trust people, which makes it hard for him to form close relationships. 

Many of these are the same lessons I learned from my Dad – an admission that still feels like a weakness because of how deeply those lessons are embedded. Yet unlike my siblings, I’m not expected to see him as a role model and his survival methods don’t fully apply to me. I will never struggle against the systematic racism he has, and when people look at us, they would never assume we’re a family. Dad raised me as his own child, but as soon as the public gaze was involved, we were separated by it. When I was younger, I would sometimes stand back and look at the rest of my family and know that my presence ruined the family portrait – everyone else fit together but I was the odd appendage. Like Kendrick, I learned not to speak about discomfort or pain, which might have helped me navigate that feeling of separation. Instead, I sought out achievement. 

To Kendrick’s father, emotion and empathy are seen as weaknesses and material gains are prioritized: “fuck everybody, go get your money, son”. Kendrick admits that he needs help to unpack the way he was brought up and undo the harmful lessons of his childhood. At the end of the song, he expands from his personal history into a lesson he hopes other men will learn: to be better than their fathers. 

May your blessings be neutral to your toddlers
It’s crucial, they can’t stop us if we see the mistakes
‘Til then, let’s give the women a break, grown men with Daddy issues


Much of the contemporary rap landscape perpetuates the ideals Kendrick’s father teaches him. Toughness, competitiveness, and individuality are lauded as the methods needed to survive in a world that systematically discriminates against men of color. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers’ dismantling of those ideals is part of the reason why the album is so significant.

When I was younger, I would sometimes stand back and look at the rest of my family and know that my presence ruined the family portrait – everyone else fit together but I was the odd appendage. Like Kendrick, I learned not to speak about discomfort or pain, which might have helped me navigate that feeling of separation. Instead, I sought out achievement.

Radically, “Father Time” pivots in one of its last lines to focus on how men’s Daddy issues cause women harm. In the end he asserts that patriarchy has hurt him but it’s his responsibility to uproot it within himself and protect his children and the women in his life from the trauma it causes. This feminist realization offers fathers a method for dismantling patriarchy within themselves and their families: to look inwards.

The song also subverts the term “Daddy issues”, which is often used in a derogatory way to describe women who have been abused or abandoned by their fathers. It’s a phrase I personally dread. By appropriating it, Kendrick shifts the label’s weight so it doesn’t hang so heavily on women and takes responsibility for dismantling the patriarchy embedded in it. 

“Father Time” is one of the moments when Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers offers methods for solving the systematic problems he points out in other songs. Patriarchy might make us inadvertent killers, as he asserts in “Worldwide Steppers,” but if men can recognize their Daddy issues, take responsibility for patriarchy, and do better for their own children, maybe that system of power will weaken enough that we can break it down.

We Cry Together

“We Cry Together” was the song that made me write this essay. I had been passively listening to the album until I heard Taylour Paige holding rage, fear, and sadness in her voice as she flung accusations at her patriarchal partner. I felt like I was listening to myself in various relationships. The song transported me to my childhood, listening to my parents fight through closed doors; hearing it made me feel like a silence had been broken in myself. In the song, Kendrick and Taylour verbally spar, interrupting each other and escalating their insults until the song reaches a climax and the couple switch from fighting to having sex. It’s difficult to listen to because of the violence in both artists’ voices and the pain trembling under the surface. 

Both characters hurt each other but the accusations they make reveal the power structures at play in their relationship. Kendrick’s character starts by generalizing about the type of woman he accuses Taylour of being: “these emotional ass, ungrateful ass bitches.” Meanwhile, Taylour’s character has specific issues with him and their relationship. She says he’s always late, stingy, and cheats on her: “I ain’t slow nor ditsy, I know when you bein’ distant, I know when you fake busy.” Their opening arguments reveal that while Taylour is upset with his actions, Kendrick is frustrated with her reactions to his behavior – and his frustration is couched in how he feels about women like her generally. While Taylour’s accusations have clear solutions, Kendrick’s are vague and unsolvable. 

His accusations evoke questions that many women may have during a fight with a patriarchal partner: How emotional is too emotional? How exactly does he want her to show gratitude? And why does he direct his anger at “bitches” instead of at her? How do you argue with someone who thinks you’re crazy or that you’re starting a fight because you’re “bleedin’ and more shit”? And how does a long-term relationship devolve so quickly into anger and the threat of abandonment when a woman speaks about her pain?

As the song goes on, Taylour elaborates on her resentments, revealing that her anger runs much deeper than simple frustration and mistrust. She invests in the relationship and makes sacrifices to stay in it. “Lost friends, family, gained more enemies because of you.” She has turned down work opportunities in order to stay in the relationship and accuses him of preventing her success and hurting her self esteem. He responds that she’s trying to make him feel bad and that she’s being crazy. But he has no real defense.

When he doesn’t show empathy for the pain the relationship has caused, she starts insulting and taunting him instead. “Well shit, I shoulda sucked his... I shoulda found a bigger dick.” Kendrick only really reacts when she attacks his masculinity. In response, he takes her car keys and even when she says he’ll make her late for work he refuses to give them back. 

While her ability to affect him is limited to petty insults, he’s able to limit her mobility and freedom, which represents the true power dynamic at play in their relationship. As the patriarch, he can overpower and dominate her; earlier in the song he limits her mobility socially but also physically in this moment. While she can taunt him, she can’t exert the same control over his freedom. It’s a seemingly small moment that also foreshadows some of the larger accusations she’ll make later. 

Taylour: 
See you’re the reason why strong women fucked up
Why they say it’s a man’s world
See, you’re the reason for Trump
You the reason we overlooked, underpaid, underbooked, under shame

Taylour puts the weight of the patriarchy on Kendrick. He responds by repeating that he’s tired of women like her, “Fake innocent, fake feminist, stop pretendin.” He uses generalizations to discredit her instead of absorbing the weight of what she’s saying or recognizing complicity in the patriarchy. Their fight ends abruptly when Taylour initiates sex. 

In her essay, We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about bottom power: “a Nigerian expression for a woman who uses her sexuality to get things from men.” Bottom power is what Taylour demonstrates in “We Cry Together”. She can’t get her partner to empathize with her and the relationship has deteriorated, so she turns to sex to repair it. “But bottom power is not power at all,” Adichie elaborates, “because the woman with bottom power is actually not powerful; she just has a good route to tap another person’s power.” 

To me, there’s no doubt that Kendrick is in the wrong during this argument. His partner is accusing him of being unfaithful, lying to her, and not reciprocating her efforts, while he makes flimsy accusations about her attitude and doesn’t seem to listen to what she’s saying. The song is an example of the kind of self-awareness Kendrick calls on men to demonstrate in “Father Time.” It reveals gendered power imbalances in relationships– even when the woman is being loud and aggressive in her demonstration of anger and doesn’t seem intimidated by him. 

Dad used to accuse Mom of acting crazy. At the dinner table he said things like, “Mum likes to exaggerate,” and when they fought he would leave or ignore us for days and weeks at a time. When she pointed out the harm he was causing, he told her it was her fault for failing to appreciate him. Listening to “We Cry Together,” I wonder whether the patriarchs in my life would recognize themselves in it; whether they would find fault with Kendrick’s character, or quietly agree that “unstable ass, confrontational ass dumb bitches,” just can’t be reasoned with. 

At the same time, there is no universal female experience under patriarchy. Taylour and Kendrick are Black. The song is rooted in their experiences. While myself and my mom can use white privilege to negotiate with and overcome patriarchy, not every woman can. In the past I’ve opened up to the wrong people about the problems in my parents’ relationship– some see it as an invitation to make racist insinuations about the ways Black men treat women. I’ve seen my personal history twisted into a story that upholds white supremacy so fast that I’m wary of writing it at all. And while I’m angry about what I witnessed in my childhood, I’m even more afraid of how my story can inflict harm. Does writing what I experienced make me a killer? Do I have to choose between upholding patriarchy or white supremacy? Is there a way for the truth to unravel both?

Listening to “We Cry Together,” I wonder whether the patriarchs in my life would recognize themselves in it; whether they would find fault with Kendrick’s character, or quietly agree that “unstable ass, confrontational ass dumb bitches,” just can’t be reasoned with. 

United in Grief

The album’s opening track, “United in Grief” expresses the artist’s compulsion to tell an untold story. He’s grappling with disconnection from women, family, neighbors, and community as well as disillusionment with materiality and the need to find new ways of handling trauma. He has tried using material gains and sexual gratification to grieve, but has been compelled to finally tell the truth instead. 

There is enough material in Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers to write an entire thesis. For me, the album is a mirror: a way of understanding my life and my positionality within my family and outside of it. The album moves from Kendrick’s personal reflections on himself and his trauma to how his discoveries impact his community. The album calls on men to interrogate their ways of seeing women; fathers to end cycles of toxic masculinity with their children; and for all of us to reflect on the harmful systems we perpetuate. 

Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is arguably Kendrick’s most personal, but also his most universal album. It grounds itself in the particularities of his life and experiences but the larger questions he asks are ones most people wonder about. How do I overcome my history and trauma? How do I love better? How do I grieve?

When I was nine, my family went to Jamaica and visited the one-room house Dad and his family lived in before they moved to Canada. Afterwards, he bounced through Kingston, buying us grapefruit and teaching us to haggle over souvenirs. We told stories about Jamaica for years afterwards, snorting with laughter when we remembered Dad slipping down Dunn’s River Falls trying to get one last family photo. He wanted everything to look perfect. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood how much of his grief over his own childhood affected mine.

It’s been over a year since I spoke to Dad, so I can’t ask him what he thinks about the new Kendrick album. Our communication didn’t end with a fight. It didn’t even end when his relationship with my Mom did. In his last text, he told me he loved me and to stay safe: two phrases I ached for during my childhood. But I didn’t respond and he never reached out again. Instead, I’m using Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers to better see him, my childhood, and myself. In other words: to grieve different. 

(Everybody grieves different)
(Everybody grieves different)

Zoe Jane Patterson is co-editor-in-chief of Postscript Magazine.