On Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy establishes that the white rulers (financial, political) in America are afraid of a planet where they are no longer the ruling race, but they also point out hypocrisies related to racial purity in black communities. In Public Enemy’s conception, the world doesn’t have to be a perfect melting pot, and the group doesn’t stretch a helping hand toward whites. This dual approach makes it difficult to determine where they really stand on interracial relationships. Fear of a Black Planet would seem to imply that whites are foolishly afraid of a black uprising, and that they may protect their bloodlines at all costs, but that notion is complicated by economic power structures intersecting with racial ones on “Pollywanacracka.” In Paul Williams’s book, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War, he shows the group fighting against white purist ideology. They were fighting against the idea that there could be a pure white race, which stood above all others. To combat this they went the other direction to say both that no one is completely pure in one race, every person in the world comes from black blood originally, and interracial relationships are normally displays of peace and love (at least in most contexts). “‘Fear of a Black Planet’ hypothesizes a future where purity is not defined by racial homogeneity, … Chuck D especially questions the monopoly on purity historically attributed to ‘European’ whiteness” (Williams, 121).

On this track, a smooth talking member of the Bomb Squad extends each word on his verses in a manner never replicated on the rest of the album. Every syllable is legato, to the point of sarcasm in comparison to Chuck D’s familiar, confident flows. “Pollywanacraka” criticizes both black men and women for preferring richer and whiter significant others, while also saying, “There should not be any hatred/ For a brother or a sister/ Whose opposite race they’ve mated.” The upbeat, sampled “Polly wanna” hook would seem to imply derision toward a black man or woman who is looking for a white partner, especially when paired with the corny, deep voiced lyricist who sounds like an imitation of an old-time story teller. The whole song is in character, but whether ironic or not there are more divisions presented than just race, because in both the male and female verses, whiteness is equated to wealth. The woman is whitened when she seeks a man with money, and the black man looks for a white woman, once his pockets get full for fear that a black woman would betray him. For Public Enemy, allowing oneself to assimilate to white culture after they’ve earned their money and graduated to white communities is detrimental to the plight of the black race at large. Each decision has ripple effects, and though interracial couples aren’t evil to Public Enemy, they can be hypocritical when the impetus for that relationship comes from an economic power dynamic instead of love.

The track makes some sense in light of their affiliation with the Black Panther Party of the late 1960s—a militant black political movement which protested against police brutality and had, at times, a narrow idea of what black life should look like. Black Panther newspapers would even define roles in black sexual relationships as Jane Rhodes writes in Framing the Black Panthers, “the texts tended to argue for an assertion of masculine authority and a sexual division of labor” (107). The Black Panther newspaper said, “Black men were too interested in courting white women, while black women failed to support their men” (Rhodes 107). Chuck appears influenced by this ideology as he notes how often black people prefer white partners, but in this song he adds the economic dimension as well, moving slightly away from the Black Panther’s rigid structure to a more nuanced observation of how interracial relationships form and how respective communities view them.