I’ve been letting Donald Glover and director Hiro Murai’s “This is America” settle in my gut since I first saw it just 4 days ago. After the first viewing, I sat back, silent and horrified and breathless. And while it takes quite a bit to render me speechless, I invited my husband to sit with me for the second viewing. Since then, I’ve seen it about ten times while it’s racked up an astonishing 50 million views, and every time, it invokes new thoughts and new questions. I’m blown away by this brilliant and thought-provoking work of art.
Since then, I’ve been reading all of the commentary I can get my hands on, and there is plenty out there. I started with this piece from Aida Amoako of The Atlantic, and then this Rolling Stone piece by Tre Johnson, which notes, “Our normalization of racist violence has come at the cost of not only black lives, but black innocence.” In The New Yorker’s, “The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ Video” the writer Doreen St. Félix notes, “‘This Is America’ is currently being analyzed on Twitter as if it were the Rosetta Stone. The video has already been rapturously described as a powerful rally cry against gun violence, a powerful portrait of black-American existentialism, a powerful indictment of a culture that circulates videos of black children dying as easily as it does videos of black children dancing in parking lots.”
I follow a writer named Kiese Laymon that I first discovered when hearing his essay “How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance.” on NPR’s Selected Shorts. It’s a heart-wrenching, beautifully painful story about Kiese’s experiences with racism in Mississippi as a teen and in college. If you can get your hands on it, hearing it read out loud is so powerful (I can’t seem to locate a link). Here’s the essay on Gawker. The first time I heard it, I listened to it in the car, sitting in front of my house hanging onto every word until it was over, then I walked in a zombie state inside and reached out to the author on Twitter to thank him. I made my family listen to it on our next family road trip – those pieces that blow me over become required reading or viewing for the family.
Now, I am Facebook friends with Kiese, and I mainly stay a voyeur on his page. I learn something every time he posts a new idea or a question, as his friends and colleagues – mostly black men and women – have so much to teach me about their experiences. I have learned in this setting that this is a place where I should do more listening than talking.
Kiese is a Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Nonfiction at the University of Iowa, so I was eager to read his statements about “This is America.” However, instead of sharing his opinions as a starting point, he posted this:
“I appreciate all the takes I’m reading about ‘This is America.’ I’m not seeing many questions. I have a few. Why do you think the brother in the beginning who folks swear is Trayvon’s father is alive at the end playing the guitar, but the choir doesn’t make it? I understand the critique of fetishizing black death, and/but I’m wondering how you actually read Glover’s motivations in the world of the song. I get all the reads about his motivations in the actual world we inhabit, but in the fictive world being artfully drawn, how do you read his character? Why is the character shooting, dancing, laughing, frowning, smoking, touching, inviting, running?”
I waited for about 100 people to post their thoughts before I gathered up the courage to chime in with this:
“It certainly blew me away. I can’t shake it. On the second viewing I watched with my husband and said, ‘He is everything white people expect a black man to be.’ We expect- we demand, in fact- the black man to entertain us, to excite us, to give us music, to dance for us, to make us laugh, to be sexual for us, to frighten us, to shoot us (and to shoot his brothers), to run from us. We created it and we need to watch it on repeat to understand who we are.”
It remains my personal interpretation that this incredibly profound work is a commentary on what white America has demanded of black America since the beginning of our challenging history – and what we continue to expect. We think we’ve evolved, but we have hardly scratched the surface. We don’t accept concepts such as institutional racism, racial bias, and white privilege because it’s uncomfortable. We want black men to entertain us on the football field, but as soon as they use that platform to express an opinion or take a knee to protest police brutality, we expect them to shut their mouths and get back on the field. We expect them to dance, and we expect them to dance for us.
I’m reminded of a story my stepdaughter told me a few years ago when she was working at the Disney College Program in Orlando. She was friends with a young black man who confronted racism regularly while working there. One day, a guest barked at the kid, “Go back to where you came from!” And he simply said, “You brought me here.”
There are many compelling interpretations of “This is America.” I also agree with the suggestion that Donald Glover is asking us to consider how blasé we feel about guns, and the treatment of the guns in the video indicates a higher regard for the weapons than for the people who die due to gun violence.
I’m continuing to learn about this powerful piece, and often by people much younger than me who I believe always have things to teach me. A writer I follow on Facebook posted this perspective from her 16 year-old son:
“I’ve taken this as Donald represents America in a human form and every time he does anything wrong it’s followed by 5-10 seconds of mourning before everyone forgets about it and goes to dance and be happy as normal. His dancing is supposed to represent America attempting to distract everyone from the horrors within the country which he himself is causing. By the end everyone finally realizes it’s America’s fault and goes after him. I could be way off but that’s what I saw in my 5+ times watching this.”
Wow, to be so contemplative at 16!
I encourage you to spend some time watching this video, though it’s disturbing. I’ve read many suggestions to watch it on mute so you can focus on the imagery. It may leave you speechless, and perhaps it should, if even for just a minute, so that we can watch and listen and learn.
