She closes her most recent album, ‘‘Lemonade,’’ with ‘‘Formation,’’ in which she extols her Southern roots, then proclaims a preference for how her family looks:

My daddy Alabama, momma Louisiana You mix that Negro with that Creole, make a Texas bama I like my baby heir with baby hair and Afros I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils

She’s not merely proud of natural hair and wide nostrils. She’s expanding the beauty parameters. She’s being what has come to be known as unapologetically black. ‘‘Unapologetically black’’ is a cousin of ‘‘black power,’’ ‘‘I’m black and I’m proud’’ and ‘‘It’s a black thing.’’ Unapologetic blackness doesn’t indulge fantasies. It deals in facts, and Jackson Five nostrils are facts. If you can’t handle that: Sorry, but not sorry. Typically, the world gets a song that worships black bodaciousness — ‘‘Brick House’’ or ‘‘Da Butt’’ or ‘‘Baby Got Back,’’ songs that express black men’s preference for a black woman built a certain way. On ‘‘Formation,’’ Beyoncé states her preference for a big schnoz in a world in which a smaller, button nose remains the standard for all races. Loving big black noses isn’t a thing. Beyoncé’s saying it should be ranks as peak unapologetic blackness.

‘‘Unapologetically black’’ is a Twitter hashtag whose users make inspirational and self-celebratory posts. It names Facebook accounts and Tumblr pages that feature people with natural, unstraightened hair, brazenly eating food — like watermelon — negatively associated with black people that, like most human beings, black people also enjoy.

Unapologetic blackness may have crested during the Obama era. The wishful hope for a postracial America couldn’t withstand recurring eruptions of institutional racism, provoking a revival in black-protest culture. The country couldn’t escape the conservative white paranoia that the future occupants of the White House would turn out to be black-radical terrorists, fist-bumping us into oblivion. Some black people were nervous, too, that the president and the first lady would feel forced to sidestep or suppress their blackness. That worry was assuaged in spontaneous moments: Obama’s breaking into Al Green’s ‘‘Let’s Stay Together’’ at a campaign stop or ‘‘Amazing Grace’’ at a funeral for victims of the A.M.E. Church massacre in South Carolina in 2015. He addressed the controversial deaths of black men at the hands of the police with pragmatism and empathy, despite his awareness that certain white people would — and did — jeer. He kept going, praising rappers, ribbing basketball players, hosting a ‘‘women of soul’’ evening at the White House. In quiet but significant ways, Obama learned how to be unapologetically black, too.

The Obamas’ engagement with their blackness mirrored the culture’s engagement with the variety of blackness teeming within it. In the course of three years, the sitcoms ‘‘Black-ish,’’ ‘‘Insecure’’ and ‘‘Atlanta’’; the Marvel Comics drama ‘‘Luke Cage’’ and the Southern soap opera ‘‘Queen Sugar’’ all turned up on television. And albums arrived by Solange (‘‘A Seat at the Table’’), Kendrick Lamar (‘‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’’ ‘‘Damn.’’) and even Childish Gambino (‘‘Awaken, My Love!’’) that wrestled with the state of being refulgently black. At some point, along with ‘‘Lemonade,’’ they’ve all been deemed unapologetic in their blackness. There’s something celebratory in the phrase, but it’s also defensive and defiant. Nearly all of this work has white patronage. So a great deal of the astonishment over the proud detail of its blackness comes with an awareness of a white gaze. Blackness was never forced to owe black people an apology for anything.

Practitioners of unapologetic blackness know their culture is being watched and shared, and the pride isn’t so much in the blackness itself but in its encryption, in what the 1990s fashion company (and Solange) called Fubu — For us, by us. They were originally just talking about jeans and sweats. But the Fubu spirit continues to insist that, in a country that for so long has refused to see our full selves, we can see one another. Why should anybody have to apologize for that?