This weekend, midway through his first Saturday Night Live hosting gig, Donald Glover—sketch and stand-up comic, actor, director, writer, musician, and who knows what else—dropped a spark plug of a new music video. It is titled “This Is America,” and its vision is as laced with irony and unremittingly bleak as can be expected of the wink-winking mainstream political art of the moment—for better and worse.
In the video, a shirtless, surprisingly furry Glover—working under his musical pseudonym Childish Gambino—jives, bobs, and dips his way through a warehouse that’s being overtaken by violence. A police vehicle burns. Riots begin to rage. Kids, meanwhile, start dancing on cars. People—some of them police—start running in all directions. And Glover himself, or rather the character he’s playing, is either in on it or completely oblivious to it, cooly flexing his dance moves to the camera with a stank face and a Sambo-style grin. It’s a face that seems to demand we overlook the surrounding violence for the immediate pleasures up front, making music of the horror.
It’s a bitter spectacle, biting in all directions. The video, which has gotten 20 million views and counting on YouTube as of this morning, opens with Glover sidling up all smooth to a man with tied hands and a burlap sack over his head—a hostage? a detainee?—and shooting him dead. Later, 10 men and women in choir robes pantomime churchly gospel when, out of nowhere, Glover gets handed a rifle and massacres them all with it. “This is America,” he raps, walking away.
Glover gives us a United States that’s as disconcertingly violent as it is pointedly unperturbed by that fact. He also gives us an America in which blacks are complicit in that violence, in part thanks to entertainers like Glover himself, grinding his way through the chaos to our collective detriment. At its most basic, this is hardly a new point—Katy Perry came out with a lo-carb, artificially sweetened version of this idea just a year ago, and by even then, it was old news. Entertainers have long scolded us for being entertained—just check the history of satire.
Glover’s obviously got the upper hand on insight, however. His incongruously cheerful performance is the sharpest thing here, a compendium of arch, knowing references to everything from Jim Crow to Internet dance trends that kept Rap Genius users busy for the entire weekend. Maybe the slickest reference of all is to the Pied Piper: Glover dances a group of pre-teens in magnet-school uniforms clear of the surrounding violence like a siren-song distraction from the homework of everyday terror—which, in a way, is what he is.
I don’t know that this video (which was directed by Hiro Murai, who has also helmed much of Glover’s FX show Atlanta) changes that, really. But Glover executes it fascinatingly enough that it immediately sparked a flurry of responses online: some raves, others to the tune of “I wish he hadn’t.” A prominent complaint harped on the insistent use of images depicting violence against black people. In a world oversaturated with real images of real black death, maybe the bar is higher for deploying those images in fiction. Isn’t the shooting of that church choir, for example, a nod to the Charleston massacre? It’s a painful sight. Is it worth it?
To be honest, my immediate response to the video was to wonder since when has Donald Glover been a furry beefcake who could dance—how’d we all miss that? I appreciate the more serious readings, like the angle that the violence and entertainment here are side-by-side spectacles, ordinary and co-extent, just as they are in everyday life; a quick scroll through Twitter, past mass shootings and Marvel movie trailers, confirms as much. I take that to be an incomplete read on Glover’s point, however. His constant foregrounding of his own googly-eyed gyrations distracts from the surrounding violence, but it also, I later realized, distracts from the fact that we barely even see that violence. We don’t home in on the chaos, really, save for when Glover picks up the gun himself.
That should feel self-effacing. Instead, in Glover’s hands, it feels a little insincere. I’ve often struggled to make sense of where Glover really stands on things—of whether the political statements in his art are expressions of genuine fury or Glover just playing around with political rage like it’s a costume he can slip on and off when convenient; I must have missed the point at which Glover transitioned from apolitical black nerd to bona fide political artist. A recent profile in The New Yorker didn’t exactly clarify the timeline, but it did give us a lot to chew on, to that end. Glover is quoted likening himself to Jesus (he may have been stoned) and claiming to pick up new styles and skills (like making a TV show) strategically. Jordan Peele is quoted claiming that Glover’s show Atlanta provides “the catharsis of, ‘Finally, some elevated black shit.’”
“Elevated black shit”—I still don’t know what that is or why it’s categorically admirable. But the phrase came to mind while watching “This Is America” for the first time. The video somehow feels too convenient, too neat a gloss on whatever ideas it thinks it has. Its ambition, I sense, is to seem provocative enough that whether or not Glover actually means what he says here is ultimately secondary to the fact that he sells it well.
And that he does: it’s a bravura performance. But what’s he selling? I’m wary of any claim that “We” are distracted from black violence, because who’s “we,” really? Every other day of the week, America’s complaint is that the blacks doth protest too much. If not for the fact that it’s profitable to tell blacks that we should stick to sports, quit the protests, worry more about black-on-black violence, and be thankful for Obama’s eight years, people like Tomi Lahren wouldn’t be able to pay their rent. Is this not a sign that black anger and awareness are widespread and persistent, that blacks are not distracted—that we are, in fact, too keyed-in for America’s comfort? “This Is America” is predicated on a misdiagnosis. America, writ large, has not been unconsciously deterred from paying attention to the spectacle of racial injustice. It knows it’s there: it just doesn’t care to do anything about it.
It’s equal parts intriguing and tedious that Glover should feel the need to diagnose us, however. “This Is America” openly appeals to an America that loves to be told about itself, which is a strategy in itself—I am overjoyed, truly, for every white person on Twitter who “gets it.” They ought to: the video is tilted toward a liberal pop-culture intelligentsia so in love with getting spanked by black truth-tellers that even an artist such as Glover—who as recently as that New Yorker profile reminded us that he prefers to be excluded from the expectations of “woke” art—is answering the call to put us all in our place.
The video ends with what feels like an expression of genuine terror on Glover’s part. It’s fair to spend a little time wondering what he really means by that and, importantly, whether he really means it. Just don’t get distracted.