This week marks one of those moments in which a single individual could make for an entire college course. Last week: Janelle Monáe. This week: Donald Glover. After he dropped his This Is America video on Saturday– incidentally the same day he hosted– nay, starred in– SNL– the intellectuals of the internet just about exploded. The video features Gambino executing sick dance moves in the foreground of a warehouse in which all kinds of other stuff is going on, but you’re too focused on Glover to notice. Every so often he’ll snap out of dancing to shoot people: first a guitarist, and then a full church choir. Shocking and replete with symbolism, the video is everyone’s favorite topic of conversation this week. Some of you are already fully ensconced in the discussion, but for those who haven’t dug in yet, I’m going to direct you to some voices on this that are worth listening to, cause my lone white voice isn’t going to cut it.
“a dreamy and profoundly disturbing rumination on police brutality and gun violence and the way such serious issues clash artistically with traditional nonthreatening notions of black superstardom… Glover’s output this past weekend makes clear that merely watching the throne is no longer an option.” –Rob Harvilla, The Ringer
“The more you watch the #ThisIsAmerica video, the more you realize that there’s so much going on in the background and that Donald is just a distraction – and that’s the whole point. #StayWoke (don’t catch you slippin’ now)” –@sabu_mahlaba
“I think in a lot of ways what Glover is trying to do is really bring our focus and our attention to black violence, black entertainment [and] the way they’re juxtaposed in society. They seem to cancel each other out in the greater public consciousness,” –Rodney Carmichael, NPR’s All Songs Considered.
““This Is America” reflects the desire to use every one of our available platforms to punch at America’s conscience. So we keep recycling our trauma into art, which mainstream America then consumes and judges on the same scale as black entertainers’ less burdened white peers.” –Tre Johnson, Rolling Stone
“its frustrating how re-traumatizing black ppl is the key to legibility as a high artist. It was not for us.” -@tapji
“who needs nazis when you got teamblack malegenius eager to fling black corpses for yt clout? that’s the real tea & i stand by the shit. black men serve a dead black body over a fire beat and call themselves avant-grade. must be french for lazy.” –@hoodqueer
In words longer than a tweet: The video’s depictions of violence towards black people re-traumatize a black audience. That it needed to harm its black characters to make its point about blackness in America demonstrates that it wasn’t made for a black audience, but for white viewers who need to be reminded, graphically, of the state of affairs to pay attention.
(Also, both these tweets are a part of a longer thread from a black studies PhD student at Berkeley that is worth digging into fully, and will take you 3 minutes cause it’s tweets.)
“When God closes a Kanye, he opens a Childish Gambino” –@sarahcpr
“Without even trying, Donald Glover put Kanye West to shame” –Dani Di Placido, Forbes
That one’s emblematic of a bunch of people’s idea that “Glover is doing what Kanye thinks he’s doing.” After appearing publicly in a MAGA hat and professing his love for Trump last week, and then positing that slavery was a choice on TMZ, Kanye’s bringing up some questions about what he’s trying to do for our national conversation on race. Is this ironic? Sincere and imbalanced? An attempt at subversion, or freedom? Who knows.
Which Glover addressed this head-on in the SNL sketch called A Kanye Place, a scene set in a dark field in which Glover and his friends will be eaten by monsters if they make any noise, but they can’t keep themselves from whisper-debriefing on Kanye’s latest antics, and one by one they’re driven to loud exclamations, and get eaten. Takeaway being, he’s a total distraction, that Kanye, and yet…
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Kanye:
“West lending his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.”
