If there’s one thing that’s limitless, it is Black people’s creative yet people still tend to pigeonhole people of color into stereotypes. Lizzo shared her experience as she responds to critics who say she makes music for white people in her newest HBO Max documentary, Love Lizzo.
In an interview on The Howard Stern Show, she reveals, “[It’s] very hurtful, only because I am a Black woman, and I feel like it really challenges my identity and who I am and diminishes that. Despite having won three Grammy awards, the Michigan-born, Houston-bred singer still has to prove herself to naysayers.
This past month in an interiew in Entertainment Weekly, Lizzo gave readers a history into the racist background of pop music, stating, “I think if people did any research they would see that there was race music and then there was pop music. Race music was their way of segregating Black artists from being mainstream because they didn’t want their kids listening to music created by Black and brown people because they said it was demonic.”
Feeling largely misunderstood by the industry, Lizzo admits the motivation behind her documentary was to own her own narrative. She continues, “I feel like a lot of people, truthfully, don’t get me, which is why I wanted to do this documentary, because I feel like y’all don’t understand me, y’all don’t know where I came from. Now, I don’t want to answer [any] more questions about this s–t. I want to show the world who I am.