The ‘black planet’ that the popular rap group Public Enemy refers to is the Earth of the future. This feared Earth is not one where all other races have been replaced by the black African diaspora: this planet is ‘black’ (‘or just brown’) because the colour lines determining procreation and biological issue will be ignored by our descendants. If those lines are overridden by love and sexual desire then the racial categories of the twentieth century will be irrevocably intermingled. Public Enemy rapper Chuck D asks defenders of racial purity, ‘What's wrong with some color in your family tree?’ and reminds listeners that every human being can trace their ancestors back to Africa. ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ hypothesizes a future where purity is not defined by racial homogeneity, and given the associations of purity with goodness and virtue, Chuck D especially questions the monopoly on purity historically attributed to ‘European’ whiteness. The addressee of this song is told that if human love is allowed to flourish without the choice of romantic partner being influenced by a need to defend racial purity, the racial composition of humanity will be very different in the future.

‘Fear of a Black Planet’ comes from the 1990 album of the same name, on the cover of which the Earth falls under the shadow of a featureless darkened planet which has the Public Enemy band logo burning on its surface. By visualizing the Earth as a jeopardized sphere, and emerging at the end of a decade of heightened fears of nuclear war between the USSR and the USA (an earlier Public Enemy track is entitled ‘Countdown to Armageddon’), it is difficult not to read the blackened planet heralded by the album title as an Earth scorched by World War Three.