On May 5, Donald Glover, known by his stage name, Childish Gambino, debuted his latest single, "This is America."
Since it's release, the music video (which was filmed in only one take) attracted over 120 million views on YouTube and has been met with overwhelmingly positive reception since. The video, directed by Hiro Murai, makes a number of statements about gun violence and black lives in the United States today. The video was considered "a powerful and poignant portrait of 21st Century America" and many major media outlets have attempted to dissect the video's seemingly endless layers of meaning.
Exactly one week after the original video was released, Canadian YouTuber Nicole Arbour uploaded a "Women's Edit" parody of the video. For those of you who don't know, Nicole Arbour is a YouTube with an... infamous reputation, whose most notable scandals include her "Dear Fat People" video, which was a rant for fat people to just "be less fat" essentially, and Matthew Santoro's claims to have been in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with Arbour. Both videos have since been deleted.
Knowing about these controversies, I did not have the best expectations about the video before watching it. After watching it, the video was just as much of a shitshow as I expected it to be and more. One of the biggest issues the video has is that a vast majority of the video only features white, thin, cisgendered women, which is an awkward decision given the subject matter of the original song. The only time a woman of color is featured in the video is at the beginning of the video when a woman of color is seen sitting on a lone chair breastfeeding her child while Arbour takes pictures on her phone. Moments later, the woman is escorted away.
Many of the lyrics in the video include "This is America, got rape in my area, you got a drink, the roofies got into ya" and "We're all too old like, we're not allowed to age like." It's not that issues like ageism and sexual assault affect women every day, because they absolutely do. It's that these lyrics are oversimplified and doesn't add any thought that one may bring to the table of this discussion. The lyrics in the original song are nuanced, clever, and laden with meaning, and Arbour seems to have capitalized on this success to highlight a different set of issues in a superficial and simplified way.
Arbour attempted to justify the video once she started to receive criticism, but despite them, her "parody" missed the mark by a long shot. Not only that it appeared to make light of women's issues and that it was not clever or funny in the slightest, but as a rule, when a piece of art gives us a permanent message about one of the most pressing issues of our time, you don't mock or oversimplify it.
