Thoughts on “This is America”

Here is the music video for Childish Gambino’s (aka Donald Glover’s) new song, “This Is America”:

The great thing about a provocative music video is that it’s open to multiple interpretations. At a glance, I’ve seen a few takes that describe this as a video about guns, riots, policing, and the like. Here’s my two cents: this is a video about black men in the American imagination on the one hand, and the experience of being a black man in America on the other.

In both of those dimensions, it is a video about fear.

In the opening minute or so, Glover alternately embodies the primary ways we have of seeing black men. He is an entertainer one moment, and a threat the next. But when he embodies the entertainer he is not empowered. He is a minstrel character; he is Jim Crow himself:

And then suddenly he transforms into a hyper-masculine, violent, threatening other.

In the final moments of the video, we glimpse the irony in all of this. Black men, objects of fear in the American imagination, have ample reason to be afraid. The theme that most stood out to me in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me was fear. White Americans spend a lot of time being afraid of black people. We’re left with little room in our imaginations for how fearful the experience of being black in America can be.

When I think about the fears I have for my children—how I get angry at even the suspicion that they are being mistreated, that an adult might not be judging them as individuals—and then consider what it means to be a black parent…I am overwhelmed by all the extra work every black parent is doing to keep themselves and their children on an even keel.

I’ve now strayed a bit away from the song. But these are some rough thoughts inspired by it.