This is America is a powerful music video, crafted by Childish Gambino, that brings to light the systemic violence propelled against blacks in the United States through a thrilling hip-hop and rap inspired visual lens. In his music video, Gambino illustrates how black people are unjustly oppressed and silenced as a result of institutionalized white supremacy across history.
The video is set in a bleak, spacious warehouse, and begins with a black man playing his guitar until he is suddenly shot in the head. Gambino decides to dress shirtless to depict his raw humanness and wears uniform pants similar to those worn by Confederate soldiers to demonstrate how blacks are still in this fight against racial prejudice. His peculiar dance moves and exaggerated facial expression mimic the minstrel character, Jim Crow, which is also a term used to describe segregation laws before the Civil Rights Movement. The Jim Crow minstrel show was a popular seventeenth century show which comically mocked black people for their dark skin color, notoriously using black face.
Next, as the black choir gaily sings together, Gambino swiftly slides in front of the choir until he begins to suddenly shoot. This represents the mass killing in Charleston church where white supremacist, Dylann Roof, blasted fire on the black attendees.
As Glover repeats, watch me move, blacks in the background are chased by cops, a powerful gesture towards police brutality in America.
Then, the camera moves towards a group of black boys, wearing white masks, using their cellphones as Glover sings, "This is a celly, that's a tool." This depicts how when black people use their phones to record videos of their violence and publicize their stories across social media platforms – black people are still actively silenced.
Later, as the camera follows the crowd, a white horses, ridden by a hooded figure, strides past the police car in the background. Many claim that the white horse pays tribute to the controversy surrounding confederate statues which are still standing and glorified today.
As the video comes to a close, twitter users speculate that the rusty, aged cars represent the stalled socioeconomic and political mobility of black Americans. Others argue that the opened-door cars symbolize how black Americans are racially-profiled and targeted when pulled over, and forced to vacate their vehicles leaving their doors left open.
The video ends with Gambino running down a dark, grim hallway as he is chased. This image can be traced to Get Out 's sunken place, a mental prison where the Armitage family traps African Americans as prisoners. Gambino's This is America video has transfigured into a monument of the Black Lives Matter movement, reflecting his artistic, woke vision through hip-hop-and-rap-inspired visuals as a mode to illustrate the historical and contemporary racial bias against black people across America.
