The Culture

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here’s a difference between Black culture and American culture. Sometimes, they unfortunately get intertwined.

In America, the coolness of being Black is often enmeshed with the ever-present danger of being Black. Big, beautiful smiles on African American children are a gauze for the gaping wounds caused by conditions from which many of them come. The strength and solidarity of Black love is too often held up in contrast to the hate this country has instilled in its people; our people.

Let’s dissect “the culture.”

I celebrated Juneteenth with household chores and reading before sitting on the couch, oscillating between social media apps and double-tapping posts celebrating the anniversary of enslaved Africans in Texas learning that they’d been freed. In the background, my TV screen illuminated with images and music from The Pop Out, a one-day festival featuring hip-hop acts from Los Angeles, headlined by Kendrick Lamar.

Narrated by Vallejo’s E-40, the event put Black inner-city culture of L.A. front and center: red and blue flags, Chuck Taylors, fingers twisting up as sets were repped and folks dancing– or rather walkin’– in honor of their hoods.

Younger artists like Westside Boogie and Kalan.FrFr performed on the same stage that Dr. Dre would later rock. Viewers were reminded that Problem now performs under his name JasonMartin, that Tommy The Clown has been putting in community work for over three decades, and that DJ Mustard’s extensive list of hits still slap.

Then Kendrick hit the stage, opening with his track “Euphoria,” a six-minute diss song that dropped earlier this year, aimed at Canadian rapper Drake. The audience rapped along bar for bar. Kendrick then brought out his former TDE label-mates Jay Rock, Ab-Soul and ScHoolboy Q for hit songs like “Money Trees” and “Collard Greens.”

And then it was time for the mega-hit song of the summer, “Not Like Us.” Having grown from a Drake diss to a party anthem, “Not Like Us” is now part of the lexicon. “Sometimes you gotta pop out and show niggas” is the mantra for 2024.

With the song, and the event as a whole, Kendrick’s goal wasn’t solely to tarnish Drake’s reputation for speaking foul on the West Coast. Kendrick accomplished that handily by running back “Not Like Us” not once, not twice, but instead performing it five times in a row. His true aim went much higher: to use the region’s animosity of one man to unify the notoriously splintered communities of Southern California.

“This shit making me emotional,” said Kendrick to the crowd, as a growing number of performers and professional athletes came on stage toward the end of the show. “We been fucked up since Nipsey died… we been fucked up since Kobe died.”

As people got into place for a group photo, Kendrick, wearing a red hoodie, glasses and a red Dodgers cap, continued to speak to the audience. “We done lost a lot of homies to this music shit, a lot of homies to this street shit. And for all of us to be on stage together, unity, from each side of muthafuckin’ L.A. — crips, bloods, pirus — that shit is special, man.”

All this at the Forum in Inglewood, where Kobe and Shaq carried on the legacy of the Showtime Lakers that Kareem and Magic created. A place where superstars like Prince and Whitney Houston gave legendary performances. And now, a historic showing of Black Los Angeles culture. On Juneteenth, nonetheless.

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t was beautiful. It could’ve simply been a diss-track party. Instead, it illustrated how deeply committed Kendrick is to his community’s culture.

It also reminded me that he’s not one to shy away from critiquing it as well.

In 2022, ahead of the release of his album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Kendrick dropped the song “The Heart Part 5.” He opens the song candidly talking about conflicts of the culture. “In a land where hurt people hurt people,” says Kendrick, “fuck calling it culture.”

Kendrick didn’t perform that song last night, but I woke up thinking about it. It crossed my mind as I lay in bed scrolling social media, the sun rising on the first day of summer.

In my feed, images of people attending The Pop Out and joyous Juneteenth celebrations around the country collided with heinous videos showing multiple people shot in the aftermath of an event by Lake Merritt in Oakland.

According to reports, thousands of people were present. Many of them were young folks of color, Black people. I scrolled and saw clips of sunshine, food, music — people celebrating freedom. And then I heard recordings of gunshots, saw people ducking and diving, pools of blood and a limp body.

The culture.

This isn’t just Oakland. There were also unfortunate shootings at or after recent Juneteenth celebrations in Norfolk, Virginia;  Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and in Texas, just north of Austin.

As you read this, there are news outlets and social media pundits taking these examples of pain and framing them as an aspect of Black culture.

But it’s American culture.

Well, it’s American. I wouldn’t even call it culture. In a land where hurt people hurt people, fuck calling it culture.

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endrick’s show at the Forum wasn’t perfect. There’s righteous critiques about the lack of women performing, and the platforming of Dr. Dre given his documented cases of domestic abuse. There’s even the age-old notion that showcasing “gang culture” might lead others to want to be a part of that lifestyle.

But what our cousins to the south got right was unity. That’s Black culture, that’s African diasporic culture. We come together as a people. For funerals, parties and more, we unify. Coming together to celebrate the downfall of a collective enemy — be it a culture vulture who poses as a pop star or the institution of slavery — Black folks come together.

But the question remains: how can we continue to be in community, and not let the very American culture of guns and violence continue to creep into our celebrations?

Communication. Community. Cultivating healthy methods of healing. Offering resources. Getting rid of the pervasive American war-bent mindset. We know what the answers are, but we haven’t shown that we can apply them en masse.

I look forward to the day we collectively pop out, together — like Kendrick showed us — to celebrate Black culture.