ABSTRACT
In “Damnation, Identity, and Truth: Vocabularies of Suffering in Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN.,” André E. Key turns to the record’s third track, “YAH.,” and argues that Lamar’s embrace of Hebrew Israelite teachings appears tied to ‘ethnic suffering’ as the result of divine will rather than human agency. Hence, black people’s transgenerational suffering in an antiblack racist society demands they construct identities that argue for ethnic ‘chosenness.’ Key’s reflections on Lamar’s ties to the Hebrew Israelites signal the relevance of traditional moral epistemologies for ascertaining Afro-Jewish cultural coherence and identity. Specifically, he argues DAMN. represents an expansion of Afro-Jewish perspectives on ethnic suffering by signifying the concept of DAMNation as a legitimizing marker of identity. As Key argues, Hebrew Israelites, in the face of expansive moral evil and the constant death of black bodies, have not only posited challenges to the traditional categories of moral epistemology, they have instead articulated a theodicean framework for black identity.
