DANCE & SHAKE THE FRAME
I’m gon get it / watch me move / this a celly / that’s a tool
After the partying, after the singing, after the burning cars and the point-blank bloodshed, the video for Childish Gambino’s “This is America” offers a parting shot of Donald Glover running through darkness. For a moment, the whites of his eyes and teeth are all we can see, glinting against the shadows. It’s like he’s receding into the demise he warned us about, like we see him being drawn into the maws of the beast the rest of the video depicts so vividly. (Only steps behind, a mob of white people gain on him.) Far and away from the shrieking intimacy of the ending, the preceding three-and-a-half minutes serve us brash, well-lit bluntness. Donald stages the truth of racist violence as a relentless tableau, by turns funny and harrowing. That he can squeeze huge ideas like anti-Black violence, destitution, joy, exploitation, fear, and nonchalance into one ‘raw’ industrial space, into such a small timeframe, and in so few shots, is the import and impact of his message. Donald not only knows the truth, but delivers it breathlessly, squeezing panoramic action into dioramic proportions. It’s a highly concentrated declaration that lands like a right hook: This is America.
Between the light and the shadow, we have movement. Putting it all out for us to see means beginning almost literally, with Donald’s own body. Shirtless, unkempt, and unshaven, he becomes a perverse prophet, our guide through the storm of media images the video references. He runs more like a river — meandering, erratic — than a straight line, darting rapidly through moods, facial expressions, and degrees of likability. Funny to think of this wavering as a dance; funny to think that he actually turns it into a dance, which he does sometimes by himself, or flanked by a wandering throng of Black schoolchildren, or (in one moment) with the gospel choir he eventually massacres with a machine gun. Watching this video, I stay caught on Donald’s movement (devised in collaboration with dancer/choreographer Sherrie Silver, who also appears in the video). It’s a path that snakes between deadpan loafing, hysterical jiving, Black social dances, and a groove only he knows. His words promise an unflinching truth — This is America — but as he embodies that message, he sometimes disappears into role-playing, something secret, or something nearly unrecognizable. What appears straightforward is, it seems, only half-naked truth. Where is he going? And what kind of truth is he telling?
What if we approach about “This is America” with a sense for its movement — that of Donald, his body, his ideas, the camera. What could we learn about the trickiness of trying to ‘tell the truth’ about Black life?
Black people have known their own stories forever. Telling them, though, has taken on a particular kind of importance in the last half-decade. In their own ways, the rise of #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and associated movements sought to expose the links between Black death and state violence. They drew on a rich history of Black/queer/feminist organizing, harnessing the power of narrative to slow the easy disappearance of Black people into statistical oblivion. Visible, visual rupture became a valuable tool. Sharing photographs of those killed by police, sharing videos of those same people being gunned down, demanding body cameras for law enforcement, disturbing space through public demonstration: different people did these things for different reasons, but all of these acts trusted the power of visual evidence to honor ignored truths about Black life. The latter of these strategies rode the wave of BLM’s organizing efforts to national prominence, especially during the Ferguson, MO and Baton Rouge, LA protests in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Black people have known their stories forever, but iconic photographs of grassroots resistance suddenly alerted even the oldest, most staid corners of the country to the power of Black audacity, to the persistence of Black presence, to its undeniable visual form. However slowly, however reluctantly or greedily, mainstream media outlets gave more time and space to this brave (not-so-)new content.
Now, whether as resistance strategy, consumer good, or something in between, Black truth-telling is having a moment. Think of how many recent performances revel in “unapologetic Blackness”: a bold witness to the particulars of Black life, and an apparent unwillingness to translate or sanitize that witness for the comfort of a white audience. This is truth, in all its aspect. These stunning performances loom large, say a lot loudly, and end in sharp clear edges. They are the answer to their own question; we see them and we get it. This is who we are. The truth doesn’t ask, it just is. This is America.
We might ask how “This is America” tells this truth in its own way. Near the end of the video, as Donald dances atop an old car, the camera pulls back on a long shot to reveal a forest of more old cars, weathered glass windows, the steel beams of the warehouse. And I think, this is such a great shot, it’s like a photograph, a snapshot of something real. But what am I calling ‘real’? In this shot I sense echoes of so many depictions of Blackness I’ve seen on my screens lately: think Seven Seconds, think Strong Island, think the first act of Moonlight. Muted colors, clustered around grayscale and earth tones; dirt, dust, wear and tear; outdated cars; decaying buildings. Directors and their crews have developed a visual language to convey the squalid realities many Black people in the States (and around the world) continue to face daily, and it’s wormed its way into all sorts of works — even those which don’t tell conventional or realistic narratives. In all of these projects, audacious Black life has to press out from beneath these somber surfaces in order to be felt, to be valued, to be human. Despite what happens to us we survive. That is what’s real about being Black. This is America.
Would I say I feel Donald “pressing out from under” anything? Look at his face, flickering into twisted guises almost on its own. Look at how that face says nothing, or at least nothing appropriate, when Donald shoots other Black people. Look at how it smiles like Sambo, like Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s chilling “mask that grins and lies,” as he and the children dance almost dumb to their surroundings. Hovering between joy and death can already leave Black people in pieces; but Donald’s erratic, sometimes unidentifiable moods feel like abrupt costume changes. Put on the mask, take it off. In this video, truth hangs around Donald like a cloud. It slides over the surfaces of his half-naked body. He never struggles; truth doesn’t emanate from him, or speak through him, so much as it happens to and near him. And because the action of the video revolves around a single individual, the journey sometimes feels more like a struggle with personal turmoil than a meditation on a people’s history. After all, Donald puts himself in the place of Dylann Roof, or George Zimmerman, or whoever’s found themselves doin’ it for the Vine. He can (and does) play any role he wants. What truth is this?
I talk about role-playing, and I can’t not think about Donald as an actor. I remember how I, like many, first noticed him on the show Community, how he played the barely-understood Black man who hovered at the edge of his band of misfits. Seen, perhaps heard, but mostly only as a foil or as comic relief. I saw how Donald floated just within the orbit of whiteness, almost to mark its acceptable limit. I remember how he gave that fence-sitting a wheezing, dorky voice; when he told us he was “just a rapper” on the eve of his first tour, not once but twice, rhyming coyly over indie-pop songs. I remember how he appeared as Lena Dunham’s sometime Black boyfriend on GIRLS, and thus became her empire’s only defense against the charge of racism. I think about statements made in the name of Black truth, and I recall the phrase “a seat at the table.” For Donald, it was an actual seat on the edge of that study group at Glendale Community College; it was metaphorical, too, the single instance of Blackness in otherwise white moments.
So it surprised me when Donald emerged from two years of silence, warning us to “stay woke.” What happened? At what point did he remember his people? When did he leave the fence? Now the New Yorker reveals that projects like Atlanta make him feel “constantly watched but rarely seen.” Conflict, indeed; but is it ‘Black’ or is it mostly personal? Whose truth is this?
This is the poem his work sings: Donald is recovering from an intimate relationship with white people. (I know this song when I hear it because I sang it too, once upon a time, and am learning to forget it.) Someone like Sharon Holland, Fred Moten, or Robert Reid-Pharr might say that relationship was “erotic”; no, really; I mean, let’s even forget about the Lena Dunham thing; it’s just that white people, the things they do, the ways they think, the goals they want to enjoy made him vibrate, gave him life, and so he bound himself to them. To use Audre Lorde’s definition, the ways of white folk seemed to span “the measure between [his] sense of self and the chaos of [his] strongest feelings.” And at some point, whenever, however, he was scorned. (By the way, what do we say about “Redbone” becoming the theme song for Get Out?)
Who is this truth for? As I scroll through Twitter, the most pointed critique of this video I see is that Donald tells the ‘truth’ about Black life in America by recreating horrific Black deaths. All Black people know this world wasn’t made for us; even if we only know it distantly, we don’t need images to confirm our closeness to death. So what does Donald want to achieve in turning anti-Black violence into a spectacle, again? And again? Who is he telling? Because, remember, between the dying and the dancing, to be Black in America is (for Donald) to be viral. The Black world he imagines is one where we exist for consumption — for a White gaze — before we exist for ourselves.
I ask “whose truth is this?” and want it to stand as a question. Because in this moment, when ‘truth’ (and ‘genius,’ never too far behind) become tools of inclusion for some Black people and not others, I have started disbelieving in coincidence. I wonder at how often these instances of honesty stay fixated on white domination, however closely, when they could represent Black people doing and thinking and living for themselves. I wonder at how these truths sometimes draw strength by pitting themselves against lies, and how dishonesty gets tied to a certain look, sound, and feeling. Put on the mask: when did Donald wander into mumble rap? (Could we ask the same question of J. Cole?) I lose trust when truth is contrasted, however ironically, with the li(v)es lived by people who hide their eyes, who dye their hair, who have smooth skin, who buy too much gold and don dresses. People who apparently have not truly lived, are too pretty, too lost, not worth the attention. I see that truth has to be qualified as hard, loud, domineering, and above all, Real. Bare and intelligible, not done up. Not too feminine, not too queer, not too fanciful. Even if Donald slums it with Young Thug, 21 Savage, and Quavo on the track, the video as a whole throws its weight behind grit and danger, behind truth. What we’re left with is a document that keeps repeating the Now, and as a result stays stuck to the straight, male, even white (read: right) way of doing things. And who will that truth save?
Whose truth is this? Whose is Truth? When artists like Donald claim to be saying something ‘real’ about Blackness, I tune my voice to cheer and then stop myself, because in each case I’m convinced this brand of ‘truth’ aims to prove our worth to the world — that is, to folks who don’t know us, meaning not us — with cold, hard facts. And just as I have with Donald, I’ve begun noting the fact of these other artists’ intimate relationships to whiteness, especially in those cases where ‘representing the race’ looks suspiciously like individualism, tokenism, meritocracy. Other people have, for instance, shown us how Kanye’s shock-laden brand of truth can’t be separated from his intense associations with whiteness and anti-Blackness. I wonder, too, what it means when that truth proves appetizing to conservative white establishments. (Props to Kendrick for his Pulitzer but, also, notice the committee’s celebration of DAMN.’s “vernacular authenticity.”) Truth is real; truth is important; but when do we decide to tell it, and why?
When we say something to shock someone, or hurt their feelings, it’s not that we don’t care about them. Just the opposite: we want them to recognize us, to sympathize, to feel because we feel. Sometimes, perhaps, telling the truth is a way of asking those we desire not to leave us lonely.
And yet. I ask “whose truth is this?” and when I think of facts peeling away from ‘definite’ reality, I hear a note of queerness in the question. No, nothing is queer about Donald’s performance in the popular sense of the word. I have no reason to think he’s not-straight, nor does the video suggest as much. And as I hope I’ve made clear, I definitely don’t think “This is America” does much to challenge norms about who we are as people, and how we’re expected to relate to one another, sexually or otherwise. But it tries to make that challenge, man, does it try; and in that trying, it wanders into queerness — a state of doing, not a ‘goal’ or an ‘identity.’ What wonder that, way back when, the words that slowly morphed into the English “queer” meant “oblique,” “off-kilter,” “turning,” “twisting.” How the dorky, jagged curves of Donald’s dancing express themselves in coiling limbs, a heaving torso, an inscrutable face.
Some months ago, a now-deleted tweet that sparked amazing conversation mused, “Young straight black men are so post racial. It’s like they grew up in a different country than other Blacks.” Making sense, in-line, in the group (which one?)…except not quite. Seated at the far corner of the table, too visible yet also receding into disappearance. Queer, as in almost-belonging; as in, the pitfalls cis-hetero Black men face when trying, and failing, to leverage a false friendship with whiteness. Especially the quirky, nerdy, respectable ones. Read that New Yorker piece and heed Monica Miller’s observation: “[A] well-educated, well-traveled Black man will be forever out of place, queer even if he is heterosexual.” Donald slithers a queer path through his apologia, wanting to lay truth bare, and we are invited to watch closely, but where does this “so fitted” / “so Gucci” / “so pretty” dancing take us? Is there even an ‘us’? Get your money, Black man. Where does he land?
I write as someone who wants to ask what it might actually mean to desire “a seat at the table.” I myself am leaving that dream behind, but as I do I remember the phrase and think of Solange, just one example of how full doing Blackness on screen, through dance and movement, could actually be. Jasmine Johnson tells us so much about Solange’s relationship with the camera, how its lens is soft and inviting, yet also a refuge for the Black womanist fantasy it holds space for. It’s a look and feel for Blackness that digs deeper than what’s on the surface of things, choosing instead to wish for what awaits in some sweeter vision. “What if you were naked, no longer seeking distraction,” Johnson hears Solange ask, “undisguised about your yesterday, and you were your own chandelier?” What tenses do we use to tell Black stories? Yes, I’m talking about time, whether we speak of Now or Back Then or some moment that hasn’t happened yet. But I also whisper something about our muscles, when (and if) we allow ourselves to relax our shoulders and loosen our fists. Not for the sake of ‘moving on,’ or giving up, though. I wonder if dwelling in something other than hardness, speed, and force can help us try on the future we want, so that we don’t get worn down, and so we can better remember why we fight.
In twisting away from Truth, I think Donald swerves into promising possibilities without even meaning to. Thinking critically about the commodification of Black resistance shouldn’t be an all-or-nothing battle, leaving us wondering whether mass and popular media are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ outlets for political expression. What becomes important is not whether Black life has its own reality, or even if our stories are being told, but how they are being told, and by whom. I think back to Stuart Hall (who told us these things way back in the 1990s!), who encourages us to reflect on the steps we take and moves we make in “articulating” a Black experience onscreen. Black artists have more access to means of production than we ever have. We, too, make choices about style, form, and content. Music video is an especially exciting place to see that vision-casting take shape — not least because currently-trendy filmic techniques can help us appreciate the ability to (en)vision more than what simply exists. They push us to ask what we can make happen, both through the camera and the movement it frames.
As fruitful as an aesthetic of Truth can be, with its emphasis on delivering plain facts, it risks putting the everyday violence and anxiety of anti-Blackness on a loop. Can we allow ourselves to believe in a story more inviting and life-giving — a story that does not have to be straight, cisgendered, or male (in body or in thought) to be valued? A story we may not call ‘truth,’ like that told in a documentary, but imagination, or love, or freedom, the things we struggle for?