If you have not watched Childish Gambino's "This Is America" music video about 50-11 times, you have not fully engaged it–and you may have missed some things. The video is worthy of being paused, rewound, fast-forwarded and replayed with and without volume. As with all art, Gambino's artistic production deserves many lenses to gain a better perspective of its meaning. There are so many themes working at once, a single gaze simply won't do.

The best way to approach "This Is America" is to first allow it to press upon the auditory and optical senses without passing judgement. Then zone in on the video for deeply embedded signs and symbols. Finally, do a closer reading of the work; consider broad context, history, what others say about it and how it all relates.

Now, let's get into how this works. 

Childish Gambino and director Hiro Murai's collaborative work does more than give us something to talk about. It gives us plenty to think about– in a number of different ways; much like we should examine life.

A superficial reading of "This Is America" says it is solely an indictment of blackness; that it shows how some black people respond to systemic violence to endure and survive in America. While that is one way to look at it, unpacking its symbolism reveals criticism of both the past and present. 

Jim Crow Gestures

The video begins as a black man walks to a chair and plays a guitar. When the beat drops and the opening lines tell us “We just wanna party; we just want the money,” Gambino enters the frame making weird facial expressions that are grotesque, impulsive and invoke discomfort. Each action is an intentional reference to the Jim Crow era. The black man playing the guitar is Jim Crow symbolism for a lazy but happy negro banjo player. Gambino’s facial gestures mimic a popular caricature bearing the classic face of Jim Crow. Both wrongly portray black behavior, especially since Jim Crow was neither a human character or a fictional one. African slaves depicted Jim as a happy-go-lazy crow in African folktales. Thomas Dartmouth Rice immortalized the figure by exaggerating a crippled black man’s animated storytelling style. He dressed himself in slave clothing and blackface and took his appropriated show on the road. Through Rice's performance, and others, white audiences began to incorrectly associate the f**kery with black behavior.

Confederate Pants

Confederate soldiers wore pants like these during the U.S. Civil War, where they were hellbent on defending Southern honor and keeping‌ slavery intact. In "This Is America," Gambino wears pants symbolic of how implacable white supremacy was in 18th-century America and still is today. The parallel is evidenced in white Southerners’ battle to keep Confederate monuments in place, the Charlottesville rally and the audacity to erect Confederate flags along the I-95 corridor in Virginia.

Lynching

America’s violent past is defined by the brutal abuse perpetrated during slavery, lynchings and murderous culture against black lives that extend beyond that era. From cotton-picking to lynching, burlap bags and nooses signify racial terror to blacks. Gambino executes a hooded black man. The hooded man's hands were tied, which suggests a disadvantage much like the one 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was 158 lbs. and wearing a hoodie at the time of his death, had when he had a physical altercation with and was shot and killed by a 29-year-old 200 lb. man. The resemblance between the guitarist and Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, is uncanny. Later in the video, Gambino sprays a singing church choir with an AK-47 machine gun, conjuring the memory of the Charleston church massacre.

 

Trap Music

Have you read the lyrics to the song? Trap music portrayed in the song constantly pursues the typical American dream, which reinforces material success, white supremacy and patriarchy. The American dream is a fantasy for many black people, especially those who grow up less fortunate. With trap music, young, talented musicians celebrate and participate in the unchecked violence against humanity by giving zero f**ks about poverty, police brutality or disenfranchisement. They can pop bottles and guns. They can rape and pillage. They can earn millions and be wasteful. They can be powerful. They feel as though they can be like the white folks. The trap artist lifestyle yields no accountability; only excess. At the 1:34 mark in the video, and in the image above, you can see a young boy atop a car "making it rain" as a girl dances along to the music beside and beneath him. In a perfect world, education, employment, equality and social justice would be the salve for such burning desire. But the focus lies elsewhere.

(Side note: Gambino’s overlaying of trap lyrics with Afrobeat is more than a marriage; it is Pan-Africanism at work.)

Dancing

Throughout the video, Gambino cult dances which requires awkward body rolls, twists and turns and other physical manipulation. Though he and the child dancers perform well, the cakewalk comes to mind. Slaves danced ridiculous moves that poked fun at the stiff mannerisms of their white owners who lacked dance prowess. While the performance was comic relief for those enslaved, slave owners misinterpreted it as entertainment, not realizing they were the butt of the joke. Cakewalk became so intriguing to whites; they made a show of it as a slave competition. The winning prize was cake.

It is easy to view "This Is America" as a simple reflection of how black people deal. To think we body roll, gyrate, harm, kill, laugh, loot, run and self-medicate to get by undermines black people's concern for ourselves, our happiness and our country. It also undermines the artists' attempt at brilliance. Black people have transcended slavery and the stigma that we are all Jumping Jim Crows, Uncle Toms, Mammies and Jezebels.

"This Is America" ain't about black folk. To me, it is black art imitating white fantasy vis-a-vis black reality. It is about white folks and the function of white supremacy specifically in how it negotiates blackness. 

In his book, Jump Jim Crow, William T. Lhamon says: “Imitating perceived blackness is arguably the central metaphor for what it means to be American.” Childish Gambino appears to agree. 

America consumes blackness and transforms it to benefit whiteness. In a country where whiteness reigns supreme, white people see black people as spectacle, as commerce, even worse as disposable. In nuanced fashion with this video, Gambino shows us these receipts from history and today.

This is America.