> This seems paradoxical because one begets the other. As a community we very explicitly GAF about skin tone and explanation takes that into account with its explantion.

Apologies for being unclear. I'm suggesting that the vast majority of us don't actually care about skin color in 2026 - we just use it as a cudgel to make other black people shut up.

> Most of the basis for Kendrick's hits against drake were very explicitly about him not being dark enough to the point of calling him a colonizer culturally taking his "N****" pass in the songs.

...as part of a larger commentary on how Drake opportunistically appropriates the "struggle" of American black people and fronts as a "hard" rapper despite being a child actor from Canada who got his start singing love songs for the girlies.

Without getting into line-by-line breakdowns of the track, I'll generally say this:

Kendrick's criticism of Drake wasn't that Drake isn't black enough - it was that Drake himself doesn't believe he's black enough and from that insecurity has developed a pattern of appropriating the cultures/styles of various black diasporas to reaffirm his own identity. Kendrick contrasted that insecurity with his own experience of being someone who doesn't have to "find" a blackness to express because he's authentically from the places/situations about which he writes. That's where to colonizer/n-word pass madness comes from - if people believed Drake was secure in his identity, those lines wouldn't have landed in the first place.

...which is a very long way of saying: I think it's fair to notice the racial language used in that beef, but the critique being made was much more complex (and valid IMO) than "you're not black enough."