Know Your History: Kendrick Lamar Makes Legacy During Black History Month
Issue 2838 — February 10, 2025
It’s heresy, I know, but you don’t normally find me watching the Super Bowl.
However, dinner at a friend’s home during the annual Big Game was served around a television with the game on. It turns out I am glad.
Sorry, Kansas City Chiefs. Congratulations, Philadelphia Eagles. But thanks to you both for providing the perfect kickoff, as it were, for the connection to Black History Month.
Know your history and you can create the future of your choice.
Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, as BET’s Yesha Callahan noted, was “more than entertainment — it was a bold statement. From ‘Not Like Us’ to Samuel L. Jackson’s Uncle Sam cameo, Lamar reminded America that Black culture is unerasable.”
Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime performance at Super Bowl LIX on February 9, 2025
Beyonce’s recent NFL halftime show similarly made the point visually and viscerally that Black history is American history, inclusive of country and western music.
Unerasable.
Claiming one’s history is claiming an important part of oneself. Knowing where we’ve come from, what joys, accomplishments, and struggles our ancestors experienced is such a huge part of what shapes us. That’s exactly why the first of the 9 Leadership Power Tools in my book No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power is “Know your history.”
We all need to ask ourselves: how did we get the values we hold? How did we get our names? Who in our personal and cultural history has had the most impact in shaping us?
Great leaders know and show themselves authentically. That builds trust. And trust is the source of respect, which causes others to follow.
Black History Month 2025 comes at a time when its very existence is being challenged.
That makes it more relevant than ever.
Books about it are being banned, diversity programs are being dismantled so fast you can practically hear them whistling by.
There is a tendency to use these designated “history” months without much mindfulness about the essential nature of that simple principle: know your history and you can create the future of your choice.
James Baldwin, said “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.”
James Baldwin
One person’s celebration of his or her own heritage doesn’t diminish the history of others. It enriches us all.
Though I’m not Black, I owe much of my life’s path to learning about Black history in America.
The Civil Rights movement ignited my passion for social justice. I identified immediately with the struggles of an oppressed minority that had been enslaved. I am just one generation removed in my own family from the loss of many of our relatives in the Holocaust.
Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C., 1963
In fighting for the rights of others, I gradually learned how to claim and then fight my own.
And I saw that change is possible when people of like mind join together with a strategy and the persistence to make it happen. The movement showed that people working together can change anything, even the cultural norms of segregation I had grown up with in Texas.
Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices are always joined at the head. We will succeed or fail by fighting the forces of injustice together.
“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said.
Black History Month was started as a week in 1926 by African American scholar Carter G. Woodson and became a month in 1976. It’s in the month of February because both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had February birthdays.
These designated months, such as Black History Month, began primarily to fill in the blanks, to learn and teach the stories that have been left out of the history books, since the narrative of history has largely been written by dominant groups. Those who have been left out or consciously erased have the most stake in filling those gaps.
It’s necessary, even when painful, to know all of it: the good, the bad, and the unanticipated twists of events that determine the course of our present and our future.
To quote Baldwin again, “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
I don’t claim to understand all, or even most, of what Kendrick Lamar was saying in that spectacular Super Bowl halftime performance. That’s not the point.
He was delving into his own history, which is inextricably, unerasably, intwined with the history of America.
To fail to learn from history, however painful, is to miss the opportunity to create a better future for all.
GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, a global expert in women’s leadership development and DEI for individuals and companies that want to build gender balance. She is a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Find her @GloriaFeldt on all social media.