FEAR: Given To You, Driven by You
An Examination of Kendrick Lamar’s FEAR and Imposter Syndrome
By Patrick H. Jones II
Entering the brightly lit room with sweaty palms gripping a leather notebook, I nervously asked for a bottle of water to cool my overwhelmed demeanor. With the notebooks slipping out of my hands, I reached for the bottle and almost lost the leather bound note container. I was anxious and my palms were sweaty. As I was waiting, I started to wonder if I was good enough to meet with the person whom I was to meet. Was I on their professional level? Was I going to sound articulate and well-read enough? Did I have the right pedigree in my experience to be in the same room? Was I going to ask the right questions? I was in the office of a CEO of a major sports corporation and could not shake the feeling that I was an imposter in the space. I was seeking counsel and a mentor for an executive role to which I had just been promoted and I had previously had a phone call with him and was looking to meet him face to face about my next steps for engaging successfully in the new role. He had been extremely successful in this work in a previous role and was the perfect person for me to consult. I had no idea why I was so afraid, but I was. As a Black man, I had to explore what about this space made me wonder if I was enough.
At the heart of this experience was a deep, overwhelming fear. My experience in that CEO’s office made me realize that fear must be overcome to step into leadership fully and effectively. If I wanted to become a leader, I would have to treat other leaders as colleagues and as equals, but the fear I was experiencing was paralyzing, convincing me that I was an imposter in the space. I realized that if I could not overcome it, I could never actualize the good I hoped to do. As I explored this, I started to contemplate on whether this phenomenon I was experiencing had been discussed before. I wanted to look for trends, and because of my background, I naturally began by exploring hip hop for clues. I combed lyrics to find thoughts specifically addressing fear and its relationship to leadership.
To understand it better, I turned to Kendrick Lamar’s song FEAR. In the song Fear, Lamar builds a timeline around the powerful emotion. He takes us on a journey through stages of fear, where we learn how it is developed and nurtured, how it manifests itself and beats us down, and how it drives us. These three stages (development, acceptance, and driving) of fear will be important throughout anyone’s leadership journey as we seek to liberate ourselves from it. A review of these three stages will allow us to see them in our own experience and force us to look for alternatives to a short-lived, people punishing leadership approach that is based in imposter syndrome.
Developing Fear: A Generational Curse
How much of our fear takes root when we are children because of our parents? The line between our own fear and the fear we manifest from our upbringing is razor thin it seems and in the first verse of the song, Kendrick explores the origin story of his own fear. In the first verse of the song, we hear an adult character say things like, “I beat yo ass, keep talkin’ back! I beat yo ass, who bought you that?” Kendrick is describing what he may have feared as a youth through the speaker’s commands, who begins to take shape as a parent. Parents, caregivers, guardians act as our village in our neighborhoods and often they care for us, in ways that sometimes seem counterintuitive. We have to understand that sometimes this care and love is exhibited or manifested through a lens that they have developed over time — a lens of fear. Because of this, their love sometimes feels like animus. Investigators from the National Science Foundation add credence to this assertion in a study they conducted of when children begin to show fear of heights. Infants begin fearing heights as early as 7 months old, and researchers insinuate that they learn to fear heights through watching others more so than experience themselves. Watching (and listening) to others seems to be the dominant introduction to fear in Kendrick’s first verse. The mother in the first verse states, “Better not hear you got caught up, I beat yo’ ass… You better not run to your father, I beat yo’ ass… You know my patience runnin’ thin…I got beaucoup payments to make… County building’s on my ass… Tryna take my food stamps away.” This complicated line of thought shows fear of poverty being transferred to the child from the mother and being reinforced through threatened violence. I contend this is far from a bad mother that we should judge, but a worried mother with which we should empathize; she clearly wants the best possible outcome for her child and is trapped in a difficult system. However, when fear drives communication in a relationship, that fear gets handed down, much like an infant learning to fear heights by watching others. It’s hard to recognize her good intent, but we have to examine the cultural cycle. Mark Wolynn, Author of It Didn’t Start With Me, says this about fear and trauma, “Our parents’ and grandparents’ pain — their fears, their anger, their grief, their shutdowns — can all unwittingly become ours, a legacy we can perpetuate in our family. And here’s the sad part: Few of us ever make the link between our issues — our unexplained fear, anxiety, and depression — and what happened to our family members in a previous generation.” One implication of Wolynn’s explanation of intergenerational trauma and fear is that we have the ability to trace where some of our fear originated. We have the opportunity to see how fear was taught. If we ever want our children to become gracious, competent leaders, we have to discover the origin of our fears.
Accepting Fear: The Simple Story
“When I was 27, I grew accustomed to more fear,” is how Kendrick has the speaker start the third and final verse. Once again, fear is being normalized as we age. After fear is developed, it gets accepted in our psyche as a normalcy of life. In the second verse of the song, Kendrick starts most lines with the phrase, “I’ll prolly die.” Although Kendrick doesn’t say it directly, it is implied that he has accepted fear as a part of his life and is willing to accept an early death. This fear has manifested throughout his life and affected his decision-making. In the acceptance of fear, consequences expand and become a hyperbole of the complex story life actually tells. Fear relies on the simple story to thrive and remain powerful in the minds of us all. A simple story is built on cause and effect: an input and an output. Simple actions lead to grave results. Jennifer Garvey Berger states in an article about simple stories, “…you don’t need to stop using these stories; you just need to interrupt your belief in those times when they most seriously get in your way. The key to unlocking the trap of simple stories is to make them more complex.” To put it another way, fear is nurtured by a simple story. The inability to notice a simple story and make it complex leaves no room for redemption, intervention, or the fact that problems require more than the threat of a simple spanking. My simple story told me that my small HBCU in Tennessee was no match for the Harvards and Yales of the world. My simple story built a path for me to accept fear and cement myself as an imposter. Of course, as the story becomes more complex, we note that some of the finest Black minds came from HBCUs. With a more complex story, we find that I’ve been in rooms with Harvard and Yale graduates before and was intellectually capable of performing at their level and beyond. I noticed that fear did not have to be accepted, I need to build out the story I was telling myself.
Fear as a Driving Force: Success?
At this stage, fear is now driving life, decisions, and actions. In the third verse, the speaker says, “All this money, is God playin’ a joke on me? … At 27, my biggest fear was losin’ it all… Scared to spend money, had me sleepin’ from hall to hall.” Regardless of Kendrick’s success, he still struggles with the fear of losing everything and cannot enjoy it. Fear still maintains a strong hold on him, regardless of his accomplishments. This fear of loss drives the imposter syndrome that is an epidemic for people of color. The fear of losing money, respect, and status actually plays a role in stealing our joy of these things when we achieve them. Even more noticeable in this verse is the fact that the speaker’s voice is louder, more enunciated, and more confident. Even with this new found confidence, fear still plagues the actions of the speaker. Imagine all of the confident people you have met, and now add complexity to their stories knowing how trauma can haunt people while still allowing them to show outward confidence. How does someone who has experienced success deal with fear? Veronica Saldivar suggests that successful people need a, “paradigm shift…” and hitting “…the “pause” button can help you assess how and why you’re wired the way you are.” This is an extremely difficult, and necessary, task for someone consumed by fear. The task becomes increasingly difficult if the person in question cannot recognize the fear that is present within them. For Kendrick, he has the speaker ask to define the point of success in which denial is no more, “…How many accolades do I need to block denial? The shock value of my success put bolts in me…” The speaker is essentially communicating that the fear we feel is here no matter what we accomplish we can only remove the bolts by acknowledging that fear exists and then releasing it from your consciousness by examining its origin, and dispelling long standing myths within your psyche that drive how you think about life. For me, the shock and bolt manifested itself through fear of taking on executive leadership. That fear grew the more I thought about how other people might perceive my leadership. I had to essentially test my assumptions that upheld fear in my heart to dispel the myths that held me hostage. As I tested my fears by asking questions, meeting with people, and doing the things I was fearful of, I noticed that most of the fears I held were not real. This new knowledge gave me a new mind to operate in freedom over fear. Power over pain.
Fear is indeed a strong emotion and a driving force in many people, particularly people of color navigating white power structures. In some people, it drives them to stay in a place of despair or stagnation. In others, fear drives them to societal success and accolades. Fear leads us to be less than truthful with ourselves. It does this in a way that makes our failures mean more than they should and our triumphs hollow because they were born from a place that was inauthentic to our true nature. This idea of fear haunts so many leaders of color through a manifesting notion of imposter syndrome. King Kendrick shows us how our fear is born, sustained, and can even drive us to success. Our power and task now lies in us revisiting where this fear was born so we can reverse engineer its existence and take back the power that we deserve.
Note: Below is a list of standards, pedagogy, and canon texts that can serve as a model for using Kendrick Lamar’s text FEAR with students in high school. The theme of fear in Kendrick’s text can also be explored without the use of these canon texts as it stands alone well, being a part of a Pulitzer prize winning work. Pedagogically, this text by Kendrick works well when juxtaposed to Macbeth or Lord of the Flies. Student discussion and thought provoking inquiry can be built from an analysis of which author constructed a more resonating theme of fear. As students discuss, analyze, and inquire about fear during these lessons, ensure that we, as teachers and leaders, understand that the genius of Black people can be found everywhere. It can be found in Kendrick Lamar and OutKast, not only DuBois and Morrison. As soon as we start to see the genius in our past, present, and future; we can start to normalize Black excellence. As a note, FEAR does contain profanity. Educators who are considering the text can change words to retain meaning or keep the words and inform parents of the explicit content in the material.
References
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=135498&org=NSF&from=news
https://markwolynn.com/how-to-tell-if-you-inherited-emotional-trauma-how-to-break-the-pattern/
