“What It Means When Childish Gambino Says ‘This Is America’”
“Created by guns, overflowing with guns, America had always been a sort of rhetorical weapon, its greatness a cudgel applied to recalcitrant people of color at home or abroad. What the Trump campaign and election signaled was an abolition of all alternative Americas, the permanent reduction of the nation to a weapon directed at people whose skin is not pale…
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.”
