Donald rises as a protest artist
New video ‘This Is America’ has touched off a debate about race and gun violence
It’s been called a moving testament to modern times and an unflinching exploration of the wretched past experienced by African-Americans.
Donald Glover’s This Is
America, a music video that depicts gun violence amid a melange of racism, black minstrel shows, police brutality and mass killing, not only touched off a debate, it affirmed Glover’s place in the pantheon of artists who reveal uncomfortable truths about race through their work.
“The themes ain’t new but this brings it into fresh [but dark] light,” author and pop critic Luvvie Ajayi said in her online column. “It turned the mirror on this country and said ‘see your life.’ It is a read, an indictment and a challenge.”
This terrain is not new for Glover either. Through his award-winning FX show Atlanta, which has gotten critical acclaim for its portrayal of black Southern life, Glover has delved into topics ranging from single parenthood to crime, the pitfalls of fame and recently, youth suicide. As his musical alterego Childish Gambino, Glover performed This
Is America last weekend while serving as guest host of Saturday Night
Live. He released the video around the same time.
Glover also has been outspoken about his career arc. As Saturday
Night Live host, he joked about being turned down for the SNL cast in the past despite his many talents.
After his Deadpool TV project was scrapped earlier this year, Glover took executives at
FX and Marvel to task by releasing a fake Deadpool script in which the main character wonders whether racism was why the project was killed. He later deleted the tweets with his complaints, including the script.
Still, Glover’s star is rising. He’s set to appear in two upcoming Disney properties — the live-action Lion King remake and as Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Lester Spence, codirector of the Center for Africana Studies at John Hopkins University, called Glover’s This Is America an heir to Strange Fruit, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 to protest lynchings of African-Americans in the South.
There have been others: Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, N.W.A.’s [Expletive] Tha
Police, Marvin Gaye’s
Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology), Public
Enemy’s Fight the
Power. But what sets This is America apart, Spence said, is that it “functions as an R’n’B song but also functions as a really, really powerful Black with a capital ‘B’ commentary.”
“I can’t think of any other video that deals with American violence in the way that This Is America does,” Spence said.
The video’s imagery is jarring: Police chases, a black guitar player shot point-blank in the head then dragged away unceremoniously, a black choir being gunned down mid-song — both times with the weapon treated with kid gloves — all while a shirtless Gambino sings, dances and raps with a smile on his face.
The general consensus was that This Is
America was a condemnation of gun violence, which disproportionately affects African Americans. Gun violence is the top killer of African Americans aged 15 to 34, according to the NAACP, and blacks are nearly half of all gun homicide victims, while making up only 13 per cent of the population.