Kendrick Lamar meets Paolo Freire - with cameos in-between

Whoever degrades another degrades me

And whatever is done or said returns to me at last

-          “Song of Myself” (1855), Walt Whitman

I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself

-          “The Blacker the Berry” (2015), Kendrick Lamar

I’ve been struck by a few recurring themes in some books I’ve read and music I’ve listened to in recent months. They warrant much more thorough explanation but I thought I’d try to loosely connect the dots. Last year I attended a workshop on Popular Education, which I previously didn't really know anything about. Intrigued to learn more, after the workshop I sought out Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), written by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, which is considered one of the foundational texts in the field. Using a Marxist class analysis, Freire’s commentary is based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write. Although quite short, the book is dense with instructive theories and resonant quotes. In Freire’s pedagogical model, the teacher-student boundary is eschewed, so that both are active participants in their learning, critically engaging on the issues in their community and then taking action to change them. Freire writes that "the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for redemption...they cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become men".

The crux is education and teaching as indispensable tools in overcoming oppression and injustice. The “oppressed” have licence to incorporate their own knowledge and experiences into the learning-exchange, and thus the agency to shape and change their reality, rather than accepting a passive role imposed upon them by an established order. Freire critiques the “banking” model of education:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.

Beyond changing the dynamic within a classroom, my understanding is that more broadly the effect of Freire’s model would be to challenge the unequal power-relations inherent in the spread of knowledge and prevailing “reality” within a society, which are inextricably bound to preconditions of privilege and injustice, whether they be in the context of colonialism, or inequalities of class/race/gender/sexuality etc.

I was also reading George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) around the same time and noticed some similar ideas reflected. Set during the Depression of the 1930s, Orwell visits areas of mass unemployment in the North of England. While the levels of poverty he describes are (generally) not comparable to those of the present-day, it is alarming how structural inequalities and class hierarchies appear to be as entrenched now as they were then. Freire’s notion that the narrow parameters of top-down education systems serve only the interests of the powerful is reminiscent in Orwell’s discussion of working people at the behest of abstract forces of oppression:

A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that "they" will never allow him to do this, that, and the other.

This sense of alienation and disenfranchisement from decision-making and control over one’s own life remains pervasive in Western society. The success of leftist movements such as Podemos in Spain and SYRIZA in Greece (and in some respects also the rise of right-wing populism) owes much to their ability to break this democratic malaise. A much-celebrated feature of the Yes campaign in Scotland was also its reinvigorating impact on civic society – ordinary people felt they could influence politics in a way never before. Indeed, the real energy and potency of the referendum debate was generated not through the party-political establishment or the mainstream media but by individuals and grassroots organisations that were not content to fall in-line with stale visions of the nation’s future handed down by some vague and distant authority.

I found Freire’s theories also borne-out, predictably perhaps, in the writing of key figures in the African American freedom struggle. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Douglass recounts his life as a slave and his longing for freedom. After escaping from slavery, he quickly became one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement. Such was his remarkable erudition and mesmerising oratory, Douglass confounded racist presumptions about the intellectual capacity of black people, while many observers did not believe that he could have been raised in bondage. It was ultimately Douglass’s own clandestine self-taught learning which enabled him to plan his escape. He was taught the alphabet when he was 12 years old by his master’s wife, who was reprimanded by her husband for encouraging Douglass’s literacy. Douglass continued, secretly, to teach himself how to read and write, and later met the wrath of his master’s wife when she found him reading a newspaper. He reflects on the transformation of her once kind and gentle nature: "slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me…(it) divested her of her heavenly qualities". This echoes Freire’s warning that “the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead the struggle".

Indeed, Douglass’s autobiography, as well as portraying the grinding and unrelenting misery, humiliation, and cruelty wrought by the slave system, also hints at the thoroughly wretched and cowardly condition of slave owners – they appear insecure, angry, and often deeply troubled human beings. One of the most striking elements of Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave (2013), beyond its portrayal of slavery’s depravity and brutality, is the mundane, petty, and warped lives of the plantation owners, who are totally consumed and corrupted by their roles as slave masters.

Frederick Douglass’s autodidactic journey to freedom parallels that of Malcolm X over one hundred years later. Malcolm was eight years old when his father was murdered by local white racists, and lived his teens as an orphan after his mother was committed to a mental hospital. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) details his turbulent lifestyle on the streets of Boston and Harlem as a coked-up hustler and thief, eventually leading him to prison at 21. Malcolm speculates that the length of his eight-year sentence was not delivered for the act of robbery itself but rather was punishment for committing the crimes with two white women. While in jail Malcolm converted to Islam after visits from Muslim family members, and was inspired by a fellow inmate who encouraged Malcolm to make use of the prison library. Very gradually, he began to teach himself to read and write. Malcolm describes never feeling more alive as his consciousness expanded by obsessively pouring through every book he could find on history and religion, learning for the first time - and on his on terms - of the true horrors of the 400 year subjugation of black and brown people by white slavery and colonialism.

Malcolm X is perhaps most revered for instilling racial pride and self-confidence among black Americans. As a gifted leader and unapologetic advocate for the rights of his people, he is regarded as an exemplar for positive black masculinity. Yet much of what Malcolm preached was informed by his mindset and attitudes in earlier life, when he was loathed his own image, ashamed of his blackness. Malcolm recalls regularly burning his scalp with wax to straighten his hair – a “konk” -  so that he would not have the hair texture natural to black people. The tension between internalized racism and violence on the one hand, and the celebration of the richness of black life and culture in the face of oppression on the other, has long been a theme in African American art and politics. Take Nina Simone's "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", for example. 

The elegiac opening, "Ain't got no home...ain't got no country...ain't got no culture...ain't got no name", leads into a cathartic positive affirmation of the self and the collective, "I've got life, I've got my freedom...and nobody's going to take that away". It might be accurate to consider this a branch of what W.U.B Du Bois termed African American “double-consciousness” in his seminal Souls of Black Folk (1903). 

Freire posits in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that:

Almost always during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or 'suboppressors'. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men, but for them, to be a 'man' is to be an oppressor. This is their model of humanity.

Rapper Kendrick Lamar grapples with these themes on his track “The Blacker the Berry”. In the introduction he sings that “They may say I suffer from schizophrenia or somethin’/But homie, you made me”. Each verse of his exhilarating tirade begins “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015”, ultimately concluding “why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street/ When gang-banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!”. 

In spite of his self-flagellation, or rather in tandem with it, Lamar attacks the institutional racism and structural social and economic injustices that remain part of the African American experience. In the verse below, Lamar rages against and subverts long-standing racist tropes, and also alludes to modern-day profiteering from privately-owned prisons ("makin' a killin'") that are filled with young black men from impoverished neighbourhoods.

I came from the bottom of mankind

My hair is nappy, my dick is big, my nose is round and wide

You hate me don't you?

You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture

You're fuckin' evil I want you to recognize that I'm a proud monkey

You vandalize my perception but can't take style from me....

You sabotage my community, makin' a killin'

You made me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga

It's 152 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, half a century after the Civil Rights Act, and yet such a diatribe remains relevant. In the United States in 2015, there is greater wealth inequality between black and whites, and proportionately more black people in prison than during apartheid South Africa. High-profile killings of unarmed black civilians by white police have recently thrust that long-standing issue into sharpened focus. If Freire’s model for liberation has a role to play, then resulting bottom-up campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter (instigated by three black lesbians) will surely be prominent in the struggle.