Songfacts®:

• Michael Kiwanuka was indeed a Black man in a white world. His parents are Ugandan but raised him in Muswell Hill, a mostly white area in North London. He felt like he never really fit in with either the Black or white kids, a sentiment he expresses in this song.
  
  "My Black friends just thought I was weird," he told Mojo. "With my unshaped afro, my electric guitar, my picky beard."
• Kiwanuka wrote this song with the English musician Inflo, who also produced the track. Inflo also produced much of The Kooks' 2014 album Listen.
  
  Kiwanuka recalled to Mojo: "I remember coming up with that lyric in the studio and Inflo was like, 'What's that!' If I had been on my own I would have scrapped it, because I thought it might offend people, but when you're stuck with writing you've got to go deeper within yourself and that subject has always been there lingering. When you're teenager in school or university or whatever, you just wanna fit in to the crowd. As much as being an individual is important, a great thing, what makes us human is the ability to relate and I always felt I was in between black culture and white culture."
• Michael Kiwanuka talks on the song about his lack of self-esteem. He told Q magazine: "I think deep down my low self-esteem is because I never really fitted in with the stereotypes of black culture, I always felt on the edge."
• The music video was directed by Hiro Murai, who also worked on the acclaimed video for Childish Gambino's "This Is America." It shows a young Black man dancing near an intersection when a car drives by and gets hit by a police cruiser. The dancer then ascends to the sky, still dancing.
  
  It was named best pop video at the UK Music Video awards on October 20, 2016.
• Musically, "Black Man In A White World" was inspired by a 1965 song by the blues musician Son House called "Grinnin' In Your Face," which is just hand claps and vocals.
• This is the song that got Kiwanuka out of a nasty funk. He was flying high after releasing his acclaimed debut album, Home Again, in 2012, but his confidence took a hit when Kanye West brought him in to work on his 2013 album Yeezus but didn't use any of his contributions. It got worse when his record label rejected a batch of songs he wrote for his next album, Love & Hate, saying they didn't hear a single. When he came up with "Black Man In A White World," he was proud of the song but thought it was too personal and controversial to be a single. His producer Inflo convinced him that it would work, and he was right: Listeners were drawn to the vulnerable song, and it helped the album climb to #1 in the UK.
• This won the Best Song Musically and Lyrically gong at the 2017 Ivor Novello Awards.
• Kiwanuka released a new version with the rapper Nas called "Black Man in a White World (Ghetto Gettysburg Address)" for the 2016 Netflix series The Get Down.