In Race: A Theological Account, J. Kameron Carter ambitiously embarks on a quest to trace and constructively disrupt the theological underpinnings of modern racial constructs, with an eye on liberating the discipline of theology itself from their clutches. After outlining these foundations of the, as he calls it, “theological problem of whiteness” and the gaps in how some of the available literature deals with it, Carter turns to theological readings of slave narratives to liberate both black personhood and theological discourse from what he deems to be oppressively heretical frameworks. The slave narratives epitomize a corrective break from the “pseudotheological” discourse which has, according to Carter, undergirded Christian structures of white supremacy and the havoc they have wreaked for centuries. In this spirit, I argue that we can and must broaden our theological scope to include voices from the margins not merely as supplement, but as equitable and necessary theological conversation partners and teachers.
So we turn to Kendrick Lamar, an artist from the underside of Compton, as arguably one of the finest lyricists of any genre of our generation. He is a rapper, but he is notoriously difficult to pin down in terms of the specific kind of rap and/or hip hop he belongs to. At times, he’s put into the “conscious” category of rappers who speak about social issues in a constructive way, yet much of his music is rife with the misogyny that spans across hip hop in most of its variety and many other genres of music, and he also maintains an impressive ability to flow in and out of different varieties of rap and poetry more generally. He is candid about wrestling with his own demons (not always recognizing them as such), and he places this candidness alongside a distinct, almost pastoral mission to awaken a kind of consciousness for social transformation,both of the black underclass and of America generally while also keeping an eye on transnational implications. And, importantly and famously, Kendrick is always engaging with the Divine, employing Judeo-Christian themes throughout his music. However, although he speaks of his faith often, he does not fit with what is most widely recognized as the Christian hip hop of Lecrae and his cohort, largely due to Kendrick’s use of profanity and incongruent subject matter.
Despite this set of tensions, we would be remiss to overlook Kendrick’s prowess as a public theologian. Although most do not see him as such for little other reason than our power- laden commitments to specific parameters of theology, Christianity, and intellectualism, his music, when seen as theological discourse, is powerfully significant to the kinds of questions often siloed into cathedrals and ivory towers. His song “How Much A Dollar Cost” from his 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly epitomizes this beautifully, and, in it, he demonstrates how he is able to thicken contemporary theological discourse, providing a lens that he, as a newly wealthy, black, hip hop artist from Compton, is uniquely able to provide to both academia and confessional Christianity. This paper, inspired by the work of Carter, will therefore illustrate how “How Much A Dollar Cost”, which tells the story of Kendrick’s encounter with a homeless man in South Africa, should be read as an exegesis of New Testament scripture centering around the “least of these” saying in Matthew 25, with special attention given to the specific contributions of marginalized artists like Kendrick Lamar to religious education more broadly.
The full paper is attached to this post.
