Neida Teresa

Donald Glover’s gyrating body haunts me. It is splashed across the music video to his 2018 song “This is America.” In recent years Glover, whose earlier comedic work and music was known for its open disdain of black women and fetishization of Asian women, has fashioned himself into one of the prevailing black voices of his generation. His television show Atlanta deftly and hilariously portrays the experience of poor black men trying to “make it” in the American south. That he is a multi-talented artist—a musician, a writer, a comedian, an actor, and a producer among a few other things—is undeniable. To say he is a successful black artist might be an understatement: his widely acclaimed art reaches people across racial and gender and class lines. But Glover’s music video has a glaring flaw: it throws a bunch of information at the audience without providing any coherent message to grasp on to. The music video depicts a black man moving through a warehouse, smiling as he murders people in between the steps to famous viral dances. This imagery could tell a powerful message if that was Glover’s aim. Rather, the video is ambivalent, attempting to be radical and subvert audience expectations of what black artistry can be or look like, while failing to do both of those things. It was so stunningly popular in the hours following its release, popular particularly amongst my white peers, that I found myself wondering if art, particularly art that depicts the black experience, that is so readily embraced by a white audience could ever be truly subversive of the power structure. That is question I endeavor to answer in this essay.

Before beginning my analysis, it is necessary to define a few terms. In this context, success necessitates white acceptance. One of the continuities through African American literature is the idea of being “other.” In the euro-descended West at large–and the United States specifically–black people “through systemized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior” (Lorde 854). Being “other-ed” is a feature of the black experience in America; black people in this country are classed as outside of the mainstream from birth. For black artists to enter into the mainstream and access the fame and money that that crossover attends, they must be accepted by the group considered the “norm”: white people. Acclaim has been a feature of Glover’s career since he was a writer at 30 Rock. What got him acclaim in the first place is not the concern of this paper. We just must begin with the assumption that Donald Glover is successful because of his wide acceptance by the white community, not in spite of it. Other black artists who are considered “successful” in this paper will be considered so under the same parameters.

            The idea that subversion of the power structure is a function of art produced by black people in the United States is also one that is central to this paper. Subversion is defined as “the undermining of the power and authority of an established system or institution.” There is a long tradition of creating “radical” black art in the U.S. that goes back to the slave narratives that were written as a part of the abolition movement. But radical black art, which advocates thorough political change in the U.S., is not always subversive and vice versa. For art that has the specific purpose of illuminating the struggle of the black people and aiding efforts of black liberation to be valuable, it must be both radical and subversive.

This does not mean that black art like The Cosby Show or A Different World–shows that revel in the idea that black liberation is tied to success in the capitalist system–are not valuable. It simply means that black art that wants to do the work of liberating black people must be both of those things to achieve its aims. This would necessarily impede this art from connecting with a wider white audience. The subversive nature of this liberatory art would go beyond humanizing black people to a wider audience; it would force the audience to take into consideration the role they play in furthering black people’s oppression and how they can stop it. It is difficult for successful black art to be subversive because there is usually some aspect of it that makes it palatable enough to the power structure that it is successful.

Everything in Donald Glover’s This is America video is heavily symbolic. From the red chair the guitarist sits in at the beginning to the pattern of his pants to the facial expressions he makes as he dances, the imagery in the video is deliberately constructed to be confrontational. The video opens with Gambino shooting a black guitarist in the head, and then almost immediately beginning to dance, gyrating to the music as if he is possessed. Within one minute he has nonchalantly gunned down a black gospel choir in a manner that is eerily reminiscent to the 2015 massacre at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He continues dancing and lip-syncing along to the superficial lyrics of the song (“hey, I’m so faded,” “black man get your money,” “contraband, contraband, contraband”) as the warehouse devolves into chaos around him. He kills no one else, but when he stands with his arms out, imitating having a firearm when he does not actually possess one, the crowd in the warehouse disperses. He is finally able to light a joint and dance by himself atop a car as the suddenly resurrected guitarist and a woman sit near him. Even more perplexingly, the music video ends with Gambino running through the now dark warehouse, wild-eyed and chased by figures cloaked in darkness, poised to overtake him as soon as the camera shuts off.

As poet Ladan Osman mentions in her essay “Slaying New Black Notions: Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America,’” we as an audience are “inside a feed, subject

to a stream of headlines, body counts, and our emotional static” (40). The video is a barrage of imagery that presents the audience with “chaos that’s indifferent to our human limits. The music… layered with screams, weapons firing, and hype-man ad-libs” (41). It is a stunning sight to see. The title of the song is correct, the violence depicted in the music video is America.

But Glover’s video simply presents this violence to the audience without making a clear commentary on the source of it. We as Americans understand that there is rampant gun violence in the black community—anyone who has heard the phrase “black-on-black crime” can attest to that. What is often occluded in the discussion about the violence the black community faces is the sources of that violence. A lot of violence in the black community is an after effect of years of oppression by the white American system. White oppressors are secondary to Glover’s video; when they appear, they are integrated into the background so well that you would have to look very closely to see them. What could be a piece of resonant commentary on the covert ways regular white people collaborate with the systems that oppress the black community instead falls flat because it does not challenge these viewers to consider their role in this violence and how they might help to end it.

Donald Glover’s This is America music video is presenting spectacular imagery that can illuminate for white audiences the violence that black people in the country face. By that definition, the music video is successful, but it fails to be radical or subversive because it does not challenge the power structure causing the violence it depicts. As we will see in the examples below, it would not be impossible for Glover to have produced a work that fulfilled all three of these requirements.

Hip hop, the genre of music that Glover primarily creates, has been subversive from the outset. It finds it roots in the Black Arts Movement, an aesthetic movement which began in the late-1960s and attempted to define a uniquely black art movement in the United States (Nielson 172). In a famous poem by one of the founders of the movement, Larry Neal, Neal proclaims that the white world thinks “Poems are bullshit unless they are / teeth or trees” but “black people. . . want ‘poems that kill.’/… Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead” (Nielson 162). Here, Neal is embracing the “other” status that black artists grappled with for years. He is declaring that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) is not interested in white acceptance that their predecessors might have depended on. The artists working within it were not concerned with mainstream i.e., white, approval. Rather, they outwardly shunned white acceptance to create art that could facilitate black liberation.

Similarly to Glover’s video, the artists of the BAM used visceral depictions of violence to capture their audiences attention. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “True Import” asks:

Ni***r

Can you kill

Can you kill

Can a n***er kill

Can a n***er kill a honkie

Can a n***er kill the Man.

Poets in the BAM expressed a clear desire to destroy the power structure through a revolution that began with an artistic foundation. This violent, anti-establishment rhetoric was both radical and subversive. It did the work of humanizing black anger, even if it was just to other black people. The goal of this art was to aid in liberation, and as mentioned before, to achieve that goal the art of the BAM would have had to have made non-black audience consider their contributions to the oppression of black people and what they can do to end that oppression. Both objectives would have been achieved if non-black, specifically white, audiences could stomach most of what the BAM was trying to articulate. A lot of the BAM art was so abrasive to mid-century white audiences that only the most evolved of them would have been able to look past the calls to “piss on a blond head /…[and] cut it off” to interrogate why black people might have such violent feelings toward white people. Therein lie a few of the “limitations of such” radical and subversive “performances [to] any meaningful black revolution” (Nieslon 172).

            As a sort of bridge between the capitulation to the white gaze that is present in Glover’s work and the completely staunch resistance against the white establishment of the Black Arts Movement, there is mid-2000s hip hop group dead prez. Dead prez was amongst a group of post-gangsta-rap era hip hop artist who would “make their appearance in the underground as ‘organic intellectual voices . . . hip-hop Gramscians’ influencing the mainstream (Ciccariello-Maher 142). They are an example of a hip hop act that can be radical in keeping with the tradition of the BAM, subversive to the power structure, but which also is able to breakthrough to a slightly wider audience than some BAM artists reached in their time. The oppressive, often violent facets of the American black experience like “the “war on drugs” and the criminalization of Black urban youth” are some subjects of dead prez’s music. Dead prez composed a song that did not plavce blame on black youth for selling drugs, rather they said that “whether I make a record or serve dope, I refuse to keep bein’ broke . . .as long as I come up—don’t give a fuck about the method” (145). This line reflects an understanding of a young black person’s choice to sell drugs. Dead prez does not condemn young black drug dealers, rather they express understanding of the need to no longer be broke and the desire to “come up” (145). In the same song, the duo addresses what black people in the U.S. have long acknowledged as a possible societal root of drug abuse in the black community:  that the U.S. government funneled drugs into black communities to incapacitate them. The duo raps: “didn’t know drug-dealing was a government job . . ./illegal business controls America . . ./ and Uncle Sam is the number one pusher-man” (146-147).

Dead prez employs “unification of two central elements of Brecht’s theory… production and politics” to advocate for their community with their music (142). They give voice to problems the black community faces, but they also acknowledge the larger societal factors that have led to that problem. They evade the role of the intellectual, the artist, as a collaborator with the state who legitimizes the rule of the dominant group through lending that group prestige (Gramsci). Dead prez sits on the cusp of popular and underground hip hop. “The hostile atmosphere of commercial hip-hop is such that self-production becomes almost a necessary precondition of political hip-hop,” but dead prez is not completely unknown because they have chosen to self-produce a lot of their work to maintain its integrity. The subject matter and presentation of their music is radical and subversive because it challenges the political status quo, but it also discusses the role white people/the power structure has in the continued oppression of black people. In that case, dead prez’s music would prove that it is possible for black art to be radical, subversive, and mildly[1] successful all at the same time.

            If dead prez proves that it is indeed possible for black art to be all of these things at once, why does Glover’s video fall short? First, the balance between radical, subversive, and successful is incredibly difficult to strike. It is possible for subversive black art to be considered successful under the parameters defined in this paper, but achieving success without compromising message is difficult. “Black and Third world people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity” which is something so fundamental that it can seem hopeless that a white audience will ever understand the nature of community policy and the black community’s relationship to surveillance (Lorde 854). We might assume we should “dumb down” the message to appeal to a mass audience. It is also possible that Glover, whose journey as a “black” artist only began recently, is not attempting to make art that aids the liberation of black people (Andrews). It is entirely possible that Glover is following the spirit of Hennessey Youngman, a youtuber featured in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Youngman argues that “if a n****r paints a flower then it becomes a slavery flower, flower de Amistad” (Rankine 34).Maybe Glover, like Youngman believes that “any relationship between the white viewer and the black artist immediately becomes one between white personas and black property” (34). With this understanding of the relationship between the black artist and the white audience, it is probably easier, more self-preserving, to create art that predictably commodifies violence against black bodies, with critique that “rests lightly on the surface for spectacle’s sake” (23). It is possible that creating the appearance of radical, subversive black art without actually making art that can be defined as either of those things is one of Glover’s goals. I am not sure of his motivations behind producing this haunting piece of art, because he refuses to actually explain them (Schraf).  

Works Cited and Consulted

Andrews, Travis M. “Some Took Offense at Donald Glover’s Early Work. He Has Evolved, but

the Internet Never Forgets.” Washington Post, 15 May 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/05/15/some-took-offense-at-donald-glovers-early-work-he-has-evolved-but-the-internet-never-forgets/?utm_term=.1b7df5df032d.

Ciccariello Maher, George. “Brechtian Hip-Hop: Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta

Political Mixtapes.”Journal of Black Studies. vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 129 – 160. September 1, 2005. https://doi-org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/10.1177/0021934704271175

Gramsci, Antonio. “Hegemony.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition, edited by Julie

Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.

Gambino, Childish, and Hiro Murai. “Childish Gambino – This Is America (Official

Video).” YouTube, 5 May 2018, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY.

Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Literary Theory: An

Anthology, 2nd Edition, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, pp. 854–860.

Nielson, Erik. “White Surveillance of the Black Arts.” African American Review, vol. 47, no. 1,

Spring 2014, pp. 161-177. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=99720242&site=ehost-live.

Osman, Ladan. “Slaying New Black Notions: Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”.” World

Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 4, Jul/Aug2018, pp. 40-41. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=130182899&site=ehost-live.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.

Scharf, Zach. “Donald Glover’s Answer to Why He Made ‘This Is America’ Is Perfect: ‘A Song

for People to Play on Fourth of July.’” IndieWire, 9 May 2018, http://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/donald-glover-this-is-america-meaning-interview-1201962197/.

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[1] I use the qualifier mildly because I think it will be some time before non-black audiences will actively and widely seek out music that forces them to consider their role in the oppression of black people. We’ve made some strides since the BAM, and the success of dead prez proves that, but we aren’t yet to the point where that is the case.