On “Wick Man,” a track off the deluxe version of For All the Dogs, Drake raps that: “White America say I’m becoming a threat/ Black America love to remind me what my mama look like/ As if I’d ever fuckin’ forget/ I’m never enough.” The song came out towards the end of 2023, just months before Rick Ross would repeatedly call the Toronto rapper a “white boy” and Kendrick Lamar would tell him that “we don’t wanna hear you say nigga no more.”

Drake’s relationship with his Blackness and biraciality has been a point of contention even before his recent explosive beef where his Compton contemporary repeatedly brings his race into question. “I’m so light that people are like ‘you’re white,” the Toronto rapper says in a 2011 interview with The Village Voice. “That’s what I get more than anything, people saying ‘you’re white, you’re not black.’” In his 2015 song “You and the 6″ he raps “I used to get teased for being Black/ and now I’m here and I’m not black enough/Cause I’m not acting tough/ or making stories up bout where I’m actually from.”

Jabs towards Drake’s Blackness speak to a larger issue people have with feelings of authenticity when it comes to the rapper. Lamar’s reference to him in the song “Not Like Us” as being a “colonizer,” gestures to Drake’s voyeuristic relationship to Black American culture as a Canadian biracial who was primarily reared by his white mother. Born to a Black American father and an Ashkenazi Jewish mother, questions of Drake’s racial identity have less to do with the faulty biological determinants that have been the basis for categorization. Instead, the whiteness that is being cited here evokes more of a spiritual allegiance to the race.

The conflict between Lamar and Drake highlights the incongruent journeys that have brought these men here today. Both representatives of the post-Obama, impending political upheaval of the mid-2010s, Lamar emerged as a messianic figure while Drake emerged as a post-racial jester. Lamar’s 2015 album, To Pimp A Butterfly, the album which featured era-defining songs like the affirmational “Alright,” served as the backdrop for the Black Lives Matter movement. “I make music that electrify ‘em, you make music that pacify ‘em” Lamar raps in “Euphoria” one of several response records to Drake. That same year, Drake’s biggest release was the pop rap record “Hotline Bling,” the nonsensical song about an ex-girlfriend who has moved on with her life.

There‘s always been a post-racialism that Drake has operated under. In contrast with his peers like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, Drake has skirted around the issues of race and racism throughout his career.

It should be stated here that no one is interested in Drake becoming a conscious rapper. In all the cultural identities he has briefly assumed throughout his career, from Afrobeats artist to Arabic rapper, no one is interested in seeing him become hip hop’s Malcolm X in between bars about whatever ting he’s currently obsessed with at the moment. There’s always an argument for escapism, but one must understand what they’re escaping before they can be free. “You always rappin’ like you ‘bout to get the slaves freed,” Drake raps in “Family Matters” about Lamar; a jarring line that feels less like a jab towards his rap opponent and more like an omission about his contemptuous feeling towards the idea that a Black artist would use their music to speak towards liberation.

Returning to Lamar’s line about pacifying the masses, this beef comes at an interesting time sociopolitically. We are once again in a moment of political upheaval, the same kind of cultural climate that nearly 10 years ago calcified the careers of both these men. As people have spent months in the streets and occupying college campuses in protest of the genocide against Palestinians, many have questioned the utility of celebrity in this moment. Are we being distracted? Should we expect more from our artists, especially those who have positioned themselves as holier than thou?

Lamar raps that he wouldn’t “let a Canadian nigga make Pac turn in his grave,” a reference to Drake’s AI conjuring of the late rapper’s voice on the song “Taylor Made” in an attempt to goad Lamar into a response – a move that proved to be more necrophilic than clever. But would the rapper who famously wrote “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor,” focus solely on said Canadian nigga? There’s almost a sick irony that the only rapper to meet this political moment we’re in right now is Macklemore, the white rapper who infamously bested both Lamar and Drake for Best Rap Album a decade ago at the 2014 Grammys. This past Monday, the Seattle rapper released his pro-Palestine song “Hind’s Hall” where in it he raps “I want a ceasefire, fuck a response from Drake.”

Lamar raps in “Euphoria” that “them superpowers gettin’ neutralized,” speaking to Drake’s years of near untouchability as a universally beloved and palatable figure. But if we’re to believe that Lamar’s powers are to electrify the people, it seems like he’s found his kryptonite in his pursuit for “money, power, [and] respect.”

Hanna Phifer is a journalist and critic based in Charlotte, North Carolina.