When “Fuck Your Ethnicity” first came out in 2011, there were still racial issues going on in the United States. In Kendrick’s hometown of Los Angeles (South Central Los Angeles also known as Compton to be exact), there was a student named Alexandra Wallace who posted a racist video of herself mocking her Asian classmates. There was also a situation in New York where NYPD officers posted racist protests about the “West Indian Day” parade, which is a parade in Brooklyn that celebrates Carribean culture. They said things like “this parade is ghetto training” “they are savages” and “they should’ve held the parade on Rikers Island.” It was also the year of President Barack Obama was approaching his attempt at reelection and Republicans were bashing him and looking for an opponent that could defeat him. Obama’s first election caused racial tensions to begin with, and the reelection only relit the fire. The Republicans would bash Obama talking about his immigration reform as there have been more deportations in his presidency since the 1980s. Islamophobia was also becoming a thing in 2011, as a man named Andres Breivik killed 90 people because he claims that immigrants are “destroying” Europe. Osama Bin Laden was assassinated this year as well, and while most Americans rejoice in the terrorist’s death, some were still paranoid that someone else was going to step up to take his place as the head and continued to target Islamic Americans.

Kendrick shows that his sociological imagination is a world that is diverse with no racial tensions going on whatsoever. Kendrick tackles this racism in this song in many different ways. In one line of his lyrics, he says “Racism is still alive, yellow tape and colored lines.” Not only is he talking about racism, but he was also addressing police brutality with the “yellow tape” statement and “colored” lines refers to the term “colored” which is an old school term that whites used to address blacks in the 1960s. However, despite this, Kendrick wants us to look past that and come together as people from as he says “every creed and color”. He believes that his music is the key to bringing everyone together, because whenever his concert tickets are on sale, people from different races line up to buy tickets to see him. He looks at interracial violence as pointless because “no one is going to win that war.” I see this as him referencing two instances: the one in Afghanistan and the one here in America. Kendrick uses civil rights figures to further prove his point by referencing Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, two men who had very different ways of going at racism. He is showing that by combining their two styles, that right there is being diverse.