Alicia Keys recently vented about how labels are preventing people from being their true selves.
The singer opened up about her frustrations on Instagram after taking her four-year-old son, Genesis, to a nail salon recently and he struggled over deciding to wear rainbow colored nail polish.
“He’s in the chair and he’s like, ‘I want [a] rainbow.’ So he tells the lady that he wants rainbow colors on his nails. And she brings all of these colors and she paints each nail a different color. And after she painted his nails, he looked at me and he said, ‘Mommy, I don’t want this on my nails,'” Keys said.
When she asked him why, Genesis explained that people might have problems with it.
“Can you believe this? 4 years old. He’s 4!” she said. “And he already understands the concept that someone is gonna judge him because he chose rainbow colors on his nails.”
After telling her son that people would love his nails because it showed off his creativity, she encouraged him to keep doing his own thing.
She also told him many men love to paint their nails.
“Stick with it. You chose it,” she told him. “You liked it. You do it.”
The incident left the Grammy-winning singer thinking about how judgemental the world today has become.
“The way I see it, there is masculine and there are feminine energies inside of us all, period,” she said.”It gets concerning to me that we can’t just explore these different sides of ourselves. These different energies that are within us.”
She continued: “Even for me, myself, I oftentimes express the masculine energy that’s inside of me. And, all the time, if that happens, there are the judgments, and there’s the stereotypes, and there are all the energies that come towards that. And for my boys, [it’s] similar, if they want to express the feminine energy that’s inside of them. There’s all of these judgments, and all these rules, and stereotypes, and vibes.”
“It’s really frustrating to me. I’m actually really, really frustrated about it. I ask myself, ‘Why is that? Why can’t we just express the different energies that are inside us? “We should be able to explore and express [our masculine and feminine energies] however we want to.”