Equal Representation and Heritage Preservation in Lemonade

Another critical issue that is undertaken throughout the body of work is the equal representation of all races and preservation of heritage and customs. This crisis is a focal point of Lemonade because it poses a significant threat to the minorities in today’s society.

Considering the size of the audience that Beyoncé has built for herself since the late 1990s as a professional entertainer and musician, having a diverse catalogue of opinions and ideologies represented in the film must have played a huge role in the decision-making process behind the scenes. To achieve this level of representation, the artist follows two highly uncommon, less travelled roads: she works with seven directors but combines all of their work smoothly into one whole,

In “Formation”, a young African American teenager is seen hip hop dancing in front of a white wall with “Stop shooting us” painted over it. A barricade of cops is then shown, raising their arms as they stand across from the child when he surrenders and raises his arms. This scene signifies the antagonization of the black people and culture by the police around the country, and calls both sides of the scale for truce making. In the track “Freedom”, Kendrick Lamar, who has been vocal about police brutality for most of his career as a rapper, has a guest verse where he criticizes major news media companies for misconstruing the messages in his work. Responding to Geraldo Rivera of FOX News, who concluded his critique of Kendrick Lamar’s song “Alright” by saying that it has done more damage to the black community than racism, Kendrick Lamar inserts a bar which goes “Channel 9 News tell me I’m moving backwards.” The lyric also creates a contrast between the previous track “Forward” with the use of the adverb “backwards”. Lamar continues with an emphasis on the feeling of confrontation and oppression when an African American encounters the police in the United States with the following self-explanatory