Throughout DAMN., Kendrick Lamar explores the constantly shifting relationships between pride and humility, love and lust, fear and faith. “DNA.” considers an even more delicate balance: how an impartial world views Kendrick’s blackness versus how he views his own. Produced by Mike WiLL Made-It, the song dissects the ways he has been shaped by these competing perceptions. “I know murder, conviction/Burners, boosters, burglars, ballers, dead, redemption/Scholars, fathers dead with kids,” he rattles off. “I wish I was fed forgiveness.”

More than an unflinching personal history, “DNA.” warps into a power play that takes American values to task. “This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years,” Geraldo Rivera interjects in a sample from a Fox News segment aimed at Kendrick, as the beat twists into menacing shapes around him.

The rapper responds with a verse that is as much a molotov aimed at bigoted punditry and the culture of fear it breeds as it is a powder-keg for its misinterpretation of rap music and the artists that made it. The lyrics are plainspoken parables on harsh realities stemming from decades of programming and rewiring—the systematic racism Geraldo so casually writes off. Here, rap is a vehicle through which Kendrick examines his blackness and how it functions in his community and the world at large: At first, he sees rap as a cure for the symptoms of oppression, as he revels in the spoils of his conquest, but in the end it feeds back into the same cycle of greed and influence that disenfranchises others. He doesn’t know how to rebalance the scales, but he won’t stop searching for answers.