Critical Introduction

Hello There! We are a group of students from University of Maryland are creating a rhetorical analysis of the Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights Movements through music. Each of us have made a point to actively stay informed on the racial issues that face the United States, whether that is through current event courses or being an avid news watcher. We chose to study “I Wish I Knew” from 1967 by Nina Simone because it had a strong influence on Martin Luther King Jr. and Simone’s history and the relationship with the Civil RIghts Movement interested us. For our present day text, we chose Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the Grammys this year. This text is still very fresh and the performance has only just begun making it impact on pop culture.Through musical performance to a diversified audience, Nina Simone and Kendrick Lamar create platforms that exploit the persistent racial divide between African Americans and Caucasians and plead for social intervention.

“I Wish I Knew” is about dreams of the future, dreams where Nina Simone is free as well as all African Americans. Her song is meant to swell in the hearts of people and encourage them to join the Civil Rights Movement. Kendrick Lamar’s performance is meant to start a conversation in the media and in households about hyper-incarceration and the dehumanization of Black men in American society. These two texts are interconnected in such a way that without the freedoms mentioned in “I Wish I Knew” being implemented in society, Kendrick Lamar would not be performing at the Grammys. However, the freedoms Nina Simone wishes for were eventually granted, but these freedoms did not alleviate all the problems surrounding race. It just became less obvious through law that there are racial discrepancies in the American Justice system.

Everyone wants to be treated equally and it’s not just up to those experiencing opressoin to put an end to the injustice. Silence adds to the issue. Everyone should be concerned about the issues faced by minorities because it affects people around them. More and more stories are coming out of minorities experiencing. Most people, if not everyone, in the United States today know about the Black Lives Matter movement and recognizes it has connections with the Civil Rights movement. However, there are many misconceptions about these movements. We hope that by reading our analyses of these texts our readers will become better informed about the current state of society and how we can learn from the past.

If you scroll back to our first posts you will read the context of our texts and the movements and as you read each piece of our analysis puzzle, we hope you will see the whole picture. Perhaps our posts will motivate you to join in the movement or just open your eyes to something you have not considered. We hope that our posts will trigger a desire in you to make a change in our society and challenge you to question your views and other’s views and actions on many issues today. Happy reading!