What happened to [Michael Brown] should’ve never happened. Never. But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us? It starts from within.
– Kendrick Lamar, 2015.
Kendrick Lamar lives a dual life. By day, he is lauded wildly as the greatest artist of a generation, the pop-cultural leader Black America has been waiting for since Tupac died and Kanye, after some promising signs, showed he wasn’t fit for purpose. His genius is frightening; a Picasso of rhythm and a Michelangelo of intricacy, his artistry is holy, dizzyingly unattainable enough to not so much inspire the next generation of rappers as the next generation of people.
And yet by night, Kendrick is a force for insomnia; haunting any Black Americans who have survived violence and racism that day (which is to say: most of them) with one question that echoes deep into the dark: Does he think this is our fault?
It seems that way sometimes. In stark contrast to most of his peers, through his art Kendrick unflinchingly asks Black people to respect themselves and each other more, and has no problem directly connecting that to the problems they face. For themselves and their people, Black America, he says, could be doing more.
If a white person said this, it would be hard not to see that as racism, perpetuating the myth that Black people are lazy, less able, less focussed, less. His status as modern prophet and the mastery with which he delivers these messages affords him a buffer; people hear him out; are slow to criticise him for his politics. That’s the power of great art, perhaps: to build a safe space in which the controversial can be discussed, without the indignance. So there is empathy and understanding when Kendrick talks. But there have always been cracks.
So is Kendrick out of touch? Has he climbed out the chasm of Blackness just to feel disgust at those he left behind? Or – perhaps – has he just given up on White America?
Kendrick returned to the world of music this month with The Heart Part 5, his traditional pre-album amuse-bouche, levelling a devastating diatribe against ‘the Culture’ and its constituents for causing cheating, murder, laziness, unemployment, alcoholism, and for not knowing how to process acts of violence as anything other than a new opportunity for memes.
But he points a stern finger, not for the first time, at Black people.
It’s a theme: i, the euphoric penultimate track to 2015 masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly, features a skit in which he intervenes in a fight that erupts during his performance of the song in his home neighbourhood:
Not on my time… 2015, n****s tired of playin' victim, dog… We ain’t got time to waste time my n***a, n****s gotta make time bro… The judge make time… It shouldn’t be shit for us to come out here and appreciate the little bit of life we got left, dog.
His response, notably, isn’t to resolve the dispute, but to end it. He doesn’t care who started it. He wants them to get their shit together and refocus. In the heat of the moment he begins a poem in the name of Black uplift, recapturing the audience, reminding them of their royal roots and imploring them to leave Black self-hatred behind.
Prior to Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers, Kendrick’s three most recent studio albums escalated his desire for Black reformation. Good kid m.A.A.d city details the complexity of staying innocent in the harsh environment he grew up in; To Pimp A Butterfly apprehends America’s materialistic obsessions for actively exploiting him and the people around him; and in DAMN. he lives out an ominous parable about the seductive dangers of anger and violence, quietly pleading with his Black listeners to choose weakness over retaliation, unity over division, peace over death. These shifting messages and angles do not suddenly appear but ebb and flow throughout his entire discography. But as he progresses, he slowly rotates the finger of blame back towards himself, and by implication on his people. And in that moment on i he indulges himself, allowing himself to play out his ultimate fantasy: breaking through to Black America with music, and ending the violence.
On To Pimp a Butterfly, for instance, he furiously brands himself – and by implication, some of his listeners – a ‘hypocrite’ for shedding tears over Trayvon Martin, as he confesses to killing a Black person himself. He asks why he should feel such fury at the sins of others when he sees himself as no better.
This type of politics doesn’t sit well with many. Black-on-Black violence is demonstrably a product of poverty, a product of generational racism, and the legacy of institutional robbery of Black people by rich White America. The consensus solution is to use policy to directly or directly reduce the racial wealth gap.
But Kendrick understands this.
In his music he references Black thought leaders like Maya Angelou, Tupac, Ralph Ellison with reverence, people who knew exactly who was to blame for the plight of their people. On TPAB opener Wesley’s Theory, Kendrick mentions the CIA’s distribution of guns (and drugs) around Black neighbourhoods; and on The Blacker The Berry, he directly blames the CIA for making him the killer he is. The villain character of the album – a silky, transfixing voice who over the record’s first half tempts and ‘pimps’ the butterflies of Kendrick and his people – is literally named ‘Uncle Sam’.
Kendrick is not confused about the real reasons underpinning poverty and crime rates in Black neighbourhoods. And yet for him, that’s not the end of the story, as on Institutionalized he sings: Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass, n***a; placing the power – and even the responsibility – of change into the hands of Black people.
On the final track of the album, Mortal Man, he finally completes the poem he’s been building after each track on the album, including this telling line:
If I respect you, we unify and stop the enemy from killing us…
The absence of any mention of white people in Kendrick’s discography has the feel of a vacuum it has taken a concerted effort not to fill. Kendrick uses samples and references to weave Black voices, Black culture, Black thought in every thread of his work, meticulously incorporating an array of voices that are fastidiously not-white.
But in this line, he gives a brief nod to his grander plan, mentioning white people as ‘the enemy’, just in passing.
It’s enlightening because that subtle exception proves the rule: Kendrick Lamar does not talk about white people; and when he finally does, he’s so disinterested that he doesn’t even bother naming them. They’re just the enemy, a ghost in the abstract, reduced to creamy furnishings in the rich Black stories he tells.
Whose hands are progress in?
Kendrick is unconcerned with White America. He isn’t ‘done with’ educating them, exhausted by pleading to ears that won’t listen – or listen and do nothing. He just never saw the point in the first place. He isn’t interested in reaching them, teaching them. They don’t get a mention in this story, other than to briefly be labelled as antagonists.
After 250 years of being let down by white people, Kendrick is out of patience. Much of this generation of white people seems different, sure; but are they really? Are things changing fast enough? Why does white America get to say “whoah whoah whoah” whenever real progress happens a little too fast for them?
The U.S.’s penchant for the status quo has never been so visible as it is now, with a Democratic President, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House somehow unable to move forward with any semblance of their relatively progressive agenda. Even with the wave of support generated by the abnormal unity after the death of George Floyd, progress has been limited to platitudes and weird virtue signalling.
The politicians blocking this real progress are elected by Fox News watchers. And again Kendrick has correctly identified Fox as one of the U.S.’s most vital tools to preventing real change, mentioning them on three of DAMN.’s fourteen tracks.
To Kendrick, it’s not that white people aren’t part of the problem, it’s that white people aren’t part of the equation. He’s concerned with the here and now and what he’s seen as his mission here on earth – to help his people help themselves. Others are already doing an admirable job of educating and making progress in a sisyphean task, even if political advances remain hard to come by.
And in Kendrick’s opinion, only once unified can Black people achieve real change.
In Kendrick’s view it’s still in the hands of Black people to make effective change, at the ballot box or otherwise. He perhaps sees the direct pursuit of progress – protesting, demanding change from those who could effect it but won’t listen – as a cart-before-horse waste of time.
Community fracture underpins even the most pressing issues like what to do about police brutality, and his plea for unity makes sense – Kendrick fears what further wrongs could be done to his people in their current state. On both of To Pimp A Butterfly’s opening tracks Kendrick cites the 40 acres and a mule Lincoln gave Southern Blacks that Johnson took away again. As long as Black people are divided and vulnerable, then whatever white people give them, they can take away again. But by healing and unifying into a stronger Blackness, Kendrick sees a way forward.
Contradiction
Kendrick speaks to provoke his people, by asking what they can do besides protest against institutions.
It’s not an either/or; but it is often seen that way, and for good reason: other Black celebrities have spoken out preaching respectability politics. In his infamous Pound Cake speech, among a myriad of other things, defying evidence, history and common sense, Bill Cosby said without shame or caveat: We cannot blame white people. An unreasonably generous reading of his speech might argue that he too had simply given up on white people; but it is more likely his words came from a deeper self-loathing, worn down by the white voices that assured him and his people that racism was over, and that any remaining problems they faced must be their own fault.
Cosby’s words scarred, and now careful distinction has to be made between honest attempts at Black uplift and dismissal of the legacy of systemic racism.
Comparing rhetoric, it is clear that there is no overlap between Cosby’s views and Kendrick’s. Cosby believed Black people were the problem; Kendrick believes they’re the answer.
Empowerment and/or Justice
Making progress on one front should not impinge on the other – but it could. Do some Black kids see the world around them, hear the system is rigged, and stop trying? It seems likely: chronic depression is higher in African Americans than in U.S. Caucasians. Encouragement doesn’t cure mental health disorders, but it can be the ray of light someone needs just to take the next step forward. Kendrick’s work could be a remedy to the downward spiral of poverty and violence that shapes so much of the Black American experience.
But could it also be the case that by focussing on Black uplift, the conversation is at risk of drifting away from enacting policies to right wrongs? That’s the fear, and this is the balance Kendrick is clearly mindful of when he talks about unifying to stop the enemy from killing us.
The delicate balance in this essay is that Kendrick Lamar’s politics could be a force for positive change, and yet should make white people (like me) uncomfortable: asking African-Americans to do more to close the racial wealth gap is grossly unfair. I tried to think of a good analogy, but there is none. Uncle Sam enslaved, raped, and lynched Africans, then freed, lynched, and lynched again their ancestors, then redlined, impoverished, and lynched (a little less) their ancestors.
Even a good-faith attempt to tell Black people their future is in their hands is fodder for white nationalists – which leaves people understandably nippy at anything that resembles respectability politics.
But it’s important to remember that Kendrick really does understand the broader issue. He simply trusts the people doing the work that leads to white voters putting their ticks next to Black names. The protestors and educators can continue their craft, while he continues his. Kendrick just wants to empower his people to act now, rather than waiting on America’s whiter half to decide how much racism they can stomach.
Young Black people – just like everyone else – need role models, and people who believe in them. And even in an uphill battle; even against a tidal wave of fresh death; even priced out of property; even battling intergenerational trauma; even without their 40 acres and a mule, Kendrick Lamar believes in African America.
