Kelsey Klotz in The Common Reader: In May 2018, Childish Gambino (Donald Glover’s musical alter-ego) dropped the single “This Is America.” ¹ Critics generated think piece after think piece dedicated to analyzing the video, which was laden with visual symbolism, including references to Jim Crow, the 2015 Charleston Church massacre, police brutality, hip hop tropes, James Brown, and global Black dance moves. What started as a seemingly clear statement—“This Is America”—resulted in a myriad of perspectives as to what exactly America was for Donald Glover.
The song was popular immediately after its release, and it had a resurgence in the renewed Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd. But the song came to my mind again after the January 6 riots at, and in, the United States Capitol Building. In the aftermath, politicians and others seemed to stumble over themselves, insisting one after the other that “this is not America.” It would seem they are correct: the United States boasts the longest-running continuous democracy in the world, and what the world witnessed at the Capitol—an extremist mob attempting to prevent by force the certification of election results—was fundamentally undemocratic. But amid those rushing to claim that “this was not America,” I (and so many others) wondered what America actually was, if not “this.”
As I revisited “This is America,” I sought a way of understanding yet another new moment of cultural pain and trauma. I was struck by what I see as Glover’s critique of love, and, in particular, his critique of White love of Black culture expressed through dualities: pleasure and profit, value and violence. The song begins with a South African choral sound in a major key, sounding upbeat and effervescent—it is hard not to groove along with Glover. But in the lyrics, he offers a critique on the music industry writ large, singing from the perspective of White industry executives to Black artists, “We just wanna party, party just for you / We just want the money, money just for you. / I know you want to party, party just for me (free).” The White industry executives begin each line focused on themselves and what they want, before quickly changing the frame, seemingly centering Black artists’ needs and wants, masking their ultimately selfish ambitions.
In the video, Glover dances to the music until he suddenly, without warning, pulls out a handgun and shoots a hooded guitarist, Glover’s body taking the pose of Jim Crow, the racist character from blackface minstrelsy. The video’s action does not stop (the gun is taken lovingly away while the body is dragged across the cement floor), but the music shifts to a hip hop beat and Glover begins to rap, “This is America.” Not one minute into the song and Glover has already juxtaposed a bop with a racial capitalist critique, implicating White industry executives in the lyrics, Black artists in a seeming willingness to enact violence against the self, and White audiences in the ability to shift so quickly between grooves. ²
More here.
