Kendrick Lamar knew To Pimp a Butterfly would make a huge impact when it landed.
Before the album dropped, Lamar was already talking about how the album would be "taught in college courses someday." He's right: Every track on To Pimp a Butterfly
is a complex look at the personal and political sides of race
relations. They are dense, academically and historically informed, and
they've revived one massive debate about race relations: culturalism
versus structuralism.
That means that Lamar attacks the structural
racism of this country while simultaneously suggesting that black
culture itself incidentally perpetuates racial inequality in this
country. It's an idea that has a lot of people very upset.
This has come up before. Lamar's
belief that black culture is partially at fault for our country's
current racial conflicts earned him a mess of controversy in January.
Speaking to Billboard about recent high-profile incidents of race-motivated police brutality, he said:
"I wish somebody would look in our neighborhood knowing that it's already a situation, mentally, where it's fucked up. 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. Don't start with just a rally, don't start from looting — it starts from within."
Lamar's comments share a history with
a theory of racism that many find troubling, and the same logic threads
throughout his new album. At the time, several cultural figures
attacked Lamar's comments. Rapper Azealia Banks tweeted
that it was the "dumbest shit I've ever heard a black man say." "Lol do
you know about the generational effects of poverty, racism and
discrimination?" she wrote.
But Lamar is no idiot. It's clear he does know. Instead of lashing back at his critics on Twitter, Lamar simply released To Pimp a Butterfly. The
album turns a critical eye to both ideas about racism in this country:
the theory that all discrimination is institutionalized and the idea
that some is invited through behavior.
The culturalist tradition. Culturalists
hold that one of the biggest impediments to the elimination of racism
comes from black culture's perceived shortcomings. W.E.B. Du Bois was
one of the first major thinkers to push this idea. In a 1899 essay
called "The Philadelphia Negro," Du Bois, according to New Yorker contributor Kelefa Sanneh, helped shape
the field of sociology. Du Bois argued that whites have to do their
duty to stop employment discrimination, which is "morally wrong,
politically dangerous, industrially wasteful and socially silly." But
blacks also had their own responsibility to work against "Negro crime"
and adapt more to mainstream norms.
Many modern writers have elaborated on these assertions. This is the sort of thinking that, at its worst, leads people to pin racism
on the height of one's pants. Recently, the culturalist argument has
found a home in hip-hop. Sociologist Orlando Patterson, editor of a new anthology attempting to redeem the culturalist tradition, believes this especially. In a 2006 New York Times article,
he examines an anecdote about the startlingly high number of black male
dropouts at one high school. Patterson's answer is that it's an
obsession with "cool-pose culture": "For these young men, it was almost
like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and
dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and
culture.
It's a dangerous idea — dangerous because it threatens to ignore the real and dire systematic bias working against black people in the United States. But it isn't one that serious critics of racism can dismiss.
As a rapper, Lamar insists on examining his own
role in shaping black culture. In the song "You Ain't Gotta Lie (Momma
Said)," Lamar describes meeting a young kid who tries to impress him.
"Askin' 'where the hoes at?' to impress me / Askin' 'where the
moneybags?' to impress me," he raps. "It's all in your head, homie."
That's the central idea of the album:
Lamar worrying over his role perpetuating hip-hop culture — for better
and for worse. On many of the songs, he recites, "I remember you was
conflicted / Misusing your influence / Sometimes I did the same." The
record can be seen as a search for the right message to encourage with
his influence. At the end, he claims he's found it: "Made me wanna go
back to the city and tell the homies what I learned," he spits. "The
word is respect."
Neither culturalism nor structuralism. What
he's saying amounts to far more than a simplistic pull-up-your-pants
argument. One especially high-voltage line is "So why did I weep when
Trayvon Martin was in the street? / When gangbanging make me kill a
nigga blacker than me? / Hypocrite!" To some, this seems like a way of excusing the racist laws and actions that led to 17-year-old Martin's unconscionable death in 2012.
But that completely misses the point.
Lamar's "Hypocrite!" is a way for him to acknowledge that he believes
both the culturalist and structuralist arguments to a degree, but that
he accepts neither as dogma. It's a bold way to collapse a historic
opposition that Lamar doesn't necessarily believe, because too often it
reduces the role of the individual and the hope for someone like Lamar
to make an album that actually changes things.
"My moms always told me, 'How long you gonna play the victim?'" Lamar told Rolling Stone in a recent profile. "I
can say I'm mad and I hate everything, but nothing really changes until
I change myself. So no matter how much bullshit we've been through as a
community, I'm strong enough to say fuck that, and acknowledge myself
and my own struggle."
It isn't an either/or for Lamar. It's a
struggle, and a question that cannot be reduced to dogmatic responses.
This is a dangerous and necessary album. There are no easy answers on
it. But this is why it's so important. Hopefully, its controversial
depiction will act as a catalyst, provoking more thoughtful discussions.
Through these, whatever direction they take, we may be able to progress
toward a more just society.
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