Kendrick's Melancholy

Do yourself a favor and get a mirror that mirror grievance
Then point it at me so the reflection can mirror freedom

-Kendrick Lamar 

The Friday that Kendrick Lamar’s album came out, I listened to it in full, in the space of an hour and a half, between work meetings, some water breaks, and excursions out onto my neighborhood stoop. That night, I fainted twice while at a rave, my eyes fully rolling back into my head, according to my friends. I had to be wheeled out to a medic tent, after which, upon regurgitating the malcontents of my sparse diet that day, I started to come to, and grew more accustomed to my surroundings.

Upon first glance, you could say it was obvious what caused the fainting. I had barely eaten that day, I was raving in heels, and I was on a crazy concoction of weed (which I’m used to) and phenibut (which, to be honest, I’d only taken, for the first time, because my friends had.) But if I’m being real, fainting was more of a delayed reaction to a deep sense of sorrow, and a desire to mourn over what I’d heard in Kendrick’s album. Sorrow was the core. All the other stuff was fodder.

If you haven’t yet listened to Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, Kendrick’s fifth studio album, you definitely should, and you definitely should brace yourself before you do. The album is revelatory, an uncovering of deep seated wounds that both Kendrick and his community — in Compton, as well as the larger African-American community — have been bearing for a long time. Those wounds, caused by poverty, domestic abuse, molestation, and gang violence, often manifest in unbearable feelings of worthlessness, insatiable envy, and shame. Without a salve, those same feelings lead to the same patterns of behavior that produced them in the first place. 

In a way I should have seen this coming. When Kendrick released, ‘The Heart pt 5’ a few weeks earlier as a precursor to his new album, it was full of those same themes, with a specific focus on the chaotic realities of gang culture, celebrity, and the pain that black men often suffer when caught in a cyclical relationship with “the culture.” 

I had some access points to how the traumas of the black community were often transferred in this way; I experienced it in childhood with my peers, many of whom, upon encountering me, a nerdy black girl with glasses who was enamored with Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes, automatically labeled me as “white,” having fully internalized the white supremacist’s notion that being black was the same thing as being stupid. And I, a child stung by their rejection, rejected them in turn, and responded with my own contempt for the forms of blackness they took so kindly to: the errors in their grammar; their idolization of the gang lifestyle; their absent fathers and their unmarried teen mothers. Hatred was exchanged for hatred and I wanted nothing to do with them. 

Home life reinforced this. My father grew up in poverty and his parents had gotten divorced when he was young. He responded to this rupture with an insistence on building and sustaining a stable marriage in adulthood, as well as a religious devotion to a higher power. Hence, every chance we got, we regularly went to church and prayed together as a family before leaving home. What is now called “black excellence,” that simultaneously conservative-yet-not-politically conservative orientation that so many black families in America have, took up residence in my family’s house with all its focus on education, financial stability, and putting God first. The only difference is that it eventually did bleed into political conservatism, and the result was heavy exposure to a regular dose of conservative talk radio segments during car rides after school. 

Such talks, disseminated then by the Sean Hannities and Glen Becks of the world, were often conspiratorial in nature, painting a bleak picture of a fallen world ruined by liberal godlessness. Looking back on this, I’ve realized that all dogmas work in the same way, regardless of their political persuasion. They split the world in black vs white or republican vs democrat or conservative vs liberal, or x vs y, and claim that heaven on earth will finally come when one of the two are rid from the world forever. 

This way of thinking has always produced evil, for it is the mark of the fanatic, and as Paul Tillich, one of the greatest 20th century protestant theologians once remarked, 

“Fanaticism is the correlate to spiritual self-surrender: it shows the anxiety which it was supposed to conquer, by attacking with disproportionate violence those who disagree and who demonstrate by their disagreement elements in the spiritual life of the fanatic which he must suppress in himself. Because he must suppress them in himself he must suppress them in others. His anxiety forces him to persecute dissenters. The weakness of the fanatic is that those whom he fights have a secret hold upon him; and to this weakness he and his group finally succumb.” 

Still, at the time, I was a devout fanatic, and I split right along with the others. Barack Obama was running for office then, and I easily swallowed the popular talk-radio notion that he was a two-bit marxist who hated America. The allure of having the perfect set of talking points to “own the libs” was so intoxicating, and was no doubt buoyed by my resentment towards my black peers who had othered me, (and who, if they even thought about politics, were definitely democrats), that it never really crossed my mind to honor the historical weight of Obama becoming the first black president. Petulant debating was the mark of my adolescence. If you sneered at me for being a black nerd with conservative tendencies, I was going to go into overdrive just to prove you couldn’t hurt me. 

But of course you could, and even though my defensive dogmas protected me from having to be vulnerable, they stopped me from fully seeing some of my black peers, which is a kind of vulnerability in and of itself. If you cannot see another person’s humanity, you will inevitably deny your own.

 Walking down the street, I’d avert my eyes if I saw a man who seemed to be part of the gang culture that Kendrick raps about. Pants hanging down, loud music blasting, cursing up a storm with reckless abandon: “this is not black excellence,” I thought. And as a defensive mechanism, I other-ized people who fit the stereotypical image of those who other-ized me in middle school. I assumed they would prejudge me, so I prejudged them.

As I got older, I moved away to New York, and organically my thoughts began to change. I had my own break with some of the conventions of my youth and started to question previously held assumptions. Eventually, I started volunteering for an organization in the city called Children of Promise that mentors kids whose parents are incarcerated. These kids have often seen the worst of humanity, including everything that Kendrick explores in his album. But as volunteers, we demanded the best of them and showered them with love and let them know that we believed in them. 

This experience gave me new eyes to see. Finally, I could see the scared little boy buried deep in the hardened man who had been driven towards a gang as a substitute for the father he never had, and for the love his father could not give him. Now when I see rap videos that glorify decadent consumerism, instead of assuming that greed is the central cause, I wonder if it’s because the people in the video did not have much growing up. When I hear male rappers screaming at the top of their lungs about how they are bosses, I ask myself  whether there was so much chaos in their upbringing, that control — no matter what toxic form it may take —  is considered an extension of manhood. 

Let me be clear: This way of seeing is not about pitying another human being but about seeing them with clarity. Though such things as greed and toxic obsessions with control are both dangerous and unhealthy, the root of such things is often some kind of suffering, and in this we are all connected. 

In ‘The Body Keeps the Score,’ author and psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk notes that victims of trauma might take actions that produce “long-term health risks [that] might also be personally beneficial in the short term.” For example, a man in prison suffering from obesity who loses weight may gain it back in order to feel the safety that comes with being the biggest guy on the cellblock. This observation begs another: That the pathologies — and let us remember that the original meaning of that word is the study of human suffering —  of black culture may be short term calculations in response to trauma, in which case the conservative Fox News nightly segments demanding black men “pull up their pants,” will prove ultimately insufficient in bringing much needed healing. 

What may help, at least to start, is precisely what Kendrick Lamar does in his album: Mourn. Invite sadness in and let it teach you something. Do not try to numb it, the way I did the night that I fainted. Be with it. Sit with the discomfort. You may discover that sorrow opens you up and allows you to see the beauty even in the midst of brokenness; you may discover that it empowers you to sit with others in their suffering. This, after all, is the true meaning of empathy, and Lord knows our world could use more of that right about now.