Decoding the Dark Imagery Behind the Meaning of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”

When it debuted in 2018 around the same time as Donald Glover’s portrayal of pansexual Lando Calrissian in the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story, his video for “This Is America” caused a huge stir, racking up 50 million views in just a few days. It sits at about 900 million now. The song combined elements of gospel music, African folk music, and trap, just as the video later integrated different visual elements.

It’s easy to see why the four-minute clip—directed by Hiro Murai, who also directed Glover in the TV series Atlanta—fascinated so many people. Shot in a large concrete warehouse space, it follows a shirtless Glover (aka Childish Gambino) as he dances and prances through different groups. He assassinates the folk singer who first accompanies him, gleefully dances with teens and young adults, guns down a black gospel choir after appreciating them, passes by riot police and a flaming car, all while performing exuberantly and often maintaining a smile on his face. In the final shot, he is running fearfully from an out-of-focus mob of white people.

Whenever he has been asked to explain the video and its ending, Glover replies that it’s not for him to say and that it’s for the people. But it is pretty obvious the clip is addressing the dumpster fire that the American social and political landscape has become. It’s like that meme of the dog sitting inside a burning house and saying “this is fine” when things are clearly not. Despite all of the tragedy that’s been heaped up in America over the last several years, we somehow ignore and deflect away from the endless cycle of racial and gun violence, perhaps hoping it will go away. Thoughts and prayers.

By not explaining what the video for “This Is America” is about, Glover prompted a conversation about racial prejudice, gun violence, and general societal chaos that has overwhelmed many Americans but never seems to lead to many solutions. However, many people have had their own ideas about what the video represents.

“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,” NPR hip-hop journalist Rodney Carmichael said in 2018. In discussing the closing scene, he said, “It feels to me like it’s a black man running from a lynch mob.” Some felt that running shot invoked Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out. “Either way, it is representative of this history of violent white supremacy,” noted Carmichael.

The clip also does not provide easy answers about the social quandaries it is exploring. As Frank Guan noted in his 2018 Vulture essay “What It Means When Childish Gambino Says ‘This Is America,’” the arrival of the Trump administration meant that any “alternative America” for others that did not include pale-skinned residents was not in the picture (at least for his voter base).

But Guan also wrote of the video: “Jubilant black culture abounds not only in resistance to the lethal violence directed at its makers, but also in complicity with it: When Glover stages the murder of a black guitarist and a black church choir, it’s not a white policeman pulling the trigger, but Glover himself, and after each killing he resumes his dancing with the same livewire energy and his rapping with the same assured flow, as if nothing had happened. If black culture affirms itself, accurately, as a testament to its makers’ capacity for grace, invention, and vigor in the face of an inhuman social reality, Glover’s own affirmation contains a shadowy admission that such makers cultivate their own agony in the act of representation.”

In her video breakdown for Insider, Alana Yzola broke down different interpretations of the symbolism throughout the video, from the Confederate soldier-type pants worn by Glover to his Jim Crow-like minstrel movements to the apocalyptic horse riding figure in the background. Then there are those cheerfully dancing young people who are protected from harm, just as he is, because their joyful African dance represents media drawing us away from dire events.

In her video, Yzola states: “Throughout the piece, Gambino plays the complex role of America herself, from violence to the use of entertainment as a distraction. He’s playing both a caricature and a ringleader.” She notes that at the end, the performer seems to snap out of America’s spell and is running like hell to escape it.

On her Medium page, Rashi Ranka wrote in 2020: “’This Is America’ appears to be a commentary on black life in America and American culture as a whole. As a piece of literature, it is almost a declaration of the hidden reality of America, more specifically of a black and white America. Within this song and its video lie various secret messages, symbolism, and ultimately a hidden truth that Glover wishes to communicate to his audience. The contrast we see within the song and the video draws attention through shifts in mood whenever there is a shooting in America against blacks. One second, the entire nation is in an uproar against the atrocity, the next, they are happy, carefree and unconcerned. ‘This Is America’ contrasts popular culture’s perception of black experience and its often brutal reality by juxtaposing happy, carefree choruses along with dark, aggressive verses that invoke emotion.”

What’s fascinating about the different viewpoints on the song is that different people find different meanings within it, yet they all seem to circle around similar themes. Yzola’s and Ranka’s points about the video’s juxtapositions are well taken. Watching the video is uncomfortable yet riveting—it mirrors the surreal quality that American life has taken in the wake of endless chaos. Beyond the overt racial issues portrayed in “This Is America,” the clips make one think about how easy it’s become to pull the trigger, from hateful social media posts to senseless gun violence that both serve no purpose. But what are we going to do about? Just keep watching?

With its fraught and intense imagery, “This Is America” remains a wake-up call, particularly to younger people, that things are not all right. It still deserves repeat viewings, but hopefully followed by our real world action.

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