Temple University to offer Kendrick Lamar-themed course on ‘Black Experience’ this fall
Temple University in Philadelphia is launching a new course this fall that explores the 'Black Experience' by studying rapper Kendrick Lamar.
The course is titled 'Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of M.A.A.D City,' named after one of Lamar’s albums.
Temple University in Philadelphia is launching a new course this fall that explores the “Black Experience” by studying rapper Kendrick Lamar.
The course is titled “Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of M.A.A.D City,” named after one of Lamar’s albums.
Timothy Welbeck, a professor at the Department of Africology and African American Studies and the director of the Center for Anti-Racism, is currently creating the course and will teach it this fall. The university does not appear to have published a course description page yet.
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Welbeck said that studying Kendrick Lamar helps students to grasp the “Black Experience” in a recent interview with NBC Philadelphia, which first reported about the course.
“Kendrick Lamar is one of the defining voices of his generation, and in many ways, both his art and life is reflective of the Black experience in many telling ways,” the professor stated.
“Being able to discuss his art in the environment that helps lead him into being the man that he is in a lot of ways can tell you him as an individual, but can also talk about the journey’s towards self-actualization particularly as it is related to the Black experience,” he continued.
Welbeck also said he hopes students come away from the course with “a deeper appreciation for Lamar, hip-hop culture and how art is a muse in which to convey the components of the Black experiences.”
In the fall, Yale University offered a course called Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music.
According to a description, the course prompted students to examine “Black Studies scholarship and Black freedom struggle scholarly and cultural texts.”
Similarly, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville has offered a Taylor Swift-based course called “Gender, Culture, and Media (Taylor’s Version).” Another course on Swift at the University of South Florida studied “values/ethics, race, ethnicity and gender; thinking and writing skills.”
According to Welbeck in his NBC interview, the university’s Department of Africology and African American Studies quickly approved his Kendrick Lamar course.
“My current department chair was very open to the idea and received it almost immediately,” he stated. “In a lot of ways, our department at Temple specifically, and Temple more broadly, has embraced the study of hip-hop in academic spaces.”
Campus Reform contacted Temple University and Timothy Welbeck for comment but did not receive a response before publication.
