Trump’s racism emboldened other racists who had lain dormant during the Obama years. Between his talk of the border wall and his long history of bigotry against black people, suddenly you started to see more incidents of vandalism in cities that hadn’t had those problems before. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported an immediate uptick in harassment in the first ten days following Trump’s election, counting 867 hate incidents. According to the SPLC, the number of hate incidents increased in almost every state; most of the incidents took place on university campuses and in elementary, middle, and high schools. A few of these incidents were against white nationalists (the group that actively supported Trump’s behavior), but the vast majority of these crimes were done to commemorate Trump’s election as president. In Silver Spring, Maryland—a city just up the road from Hyattsville—a rector at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour discovered a sign offering Spanish services had been ripped and vandalized with the words “TRUMP NATION WHITES ONLY,” according to Time. I covered education for a local newspaper in Montgomery County for almost four years (from 2007 to 2010), and these sorts of incidents hadn’t happened in Silver Spring during my time there. “Montgomery County—it’s not the kind of place where racial incidents happen, but since last Tuesday they’ve been increasing in number,” parish administrator Tracey Henley told Time in 2016. “A year ago,” Henley continued, “it wasn’t possible to be a racist bigot and get elected president. People now feel free to say racist things that they wouldn’t have said before.”
Like it or not, this was the new America. That, or the old America was waking up. This was the America that our elders used to tell us about, where a short walk to the grocery store meant being harassed. Our parents and grandparents had struggled with such racism, but to minorities who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, this level of discrimination was totally new. If you’re not white in the United States, you’re deemed “other” and treated differently, but this harassment bit harder than anything in recent years, and a walk outside meant life or death—depending on where you were. Still, in cities like Hyattsville and other left-leaning towns throughout the country, there was a glimmer of optimism, although it was tough to fully embrace at the time. Maybe the election was just a blip and somehow we’d “be alright”? Maybe that was the American dream for which our ancestors prepared us: that, when the horizon looks bleak, the only thing we can do is to hold firm to our ideals and do our best to weather the storm. But who knew? We couldn’t see that far ahead; our emotions were too raw, our future too dim. One thing was clear following Trump’s win: he was going to undo all of Obama’s work, just because he could. The would-be president was driven by ego and a tremendous will to be recognized for—well—everything. Kendrick struggled to reconcile what had just happened in America. “We all are baffled,” he told i-D back then. “It is something that completely disregards our moral compass.” Obama also had a tough time reconciling what had just happened in the election. In The World as It Is, a book written by former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, the author remembered the president’s dejection. He wondered why the American public would vote for a “cartoon,” and the results made him question if he’d miscalculated his work in office. That was the Trump effect: his victory made us question everything we thought to be true.
Trump’s election made Obama’s departure much more bittersweet. It’s one thing to pass the baton to someone with some level of decency and political acumen, but to have a hardened white supremacist running the country is quite unusual. And over the next two months, we looked to Obama for the last time as commander in chief and wondered what was next. We struggled with the words last and final: his last White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the final time he’d speak to the press corps. It’s possible that we took the Obamas for granted; we were so used to grace and maturity in the White House that we assumed it would be there forever.
During this time, Kendrick was noticeably silent, occasionally popping up to do an interview here and there, but he largely stayed out of the public eye. He had been incredibly busy in 2015, and with the dust fully settled from To Pimp a Butterfly and untitled unmastered., Kendrick went back to the lab, to his home in Los Angeles to conceptualize his next steps. But there was no telling just what that would be, or how he’d follow his first two major-label releases.
“I have ideas,” Kendrick told producer Rick Rubin for the October 2016 GQ cover story. “I have a certain approach. But I wanna see what it manifests. I wanna put all the paint on the wall and see where that goes.” Kendrick was twenty-nine years old and even further removed from the grind of trying to make it in the music industry, yet he remained focused and kept his ear attuned to what was next. So just like he’d done for Butterfly, he toiled away on new material that could’ve been something grand or nothing at all. Kendrick is a scientist in that way; he’ll write, throw away, conceptualize, and tinker with ideas, and those songs either fit into some sort of coherent project or they sit in the vault to never be heard again (unless LeBron James nudges him to release the secrets). Kendrick still had childhood trauma, survivor’s guilt, and isolation to work through, and the closer he got to thirty, the clearer he became about what ailed him and what
