An examination of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Fear’ and imposter syndrome
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 who we should judge, but a worried mother with whom 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.
Patrick H. Jones II is senior vice president of leadership and equity at The Mind Trust.
