By JaKeen Fox
May 6th 2018. The date will go down in infamy, not as the day John McCain said he wouldn’t want Donald Trump to attend his funeral. You won’t remember that in Hawaii, lava from a volcano destroyed 21 homes, and caused 1700 people and hundreds of animals to be evacuated. You won’t even remember that a story was released claiming aides to Donald Trump, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key persons from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. No, May 6th 2018 will be the day Donald Glover released his controversial music video, “This is America.” I won’t bother to articulate the irony.
In Glover’s (also known as Childish Gambino) music video we are confronted with a truly harsh reflection on how Black trauma/death is met with indifference and complacency in today’s post-racial America. Glover shoots a lot of Black people in this music video. Dances some, then shoots more Black people. We see in the background, police cars led by what we can only assume is Death on a white horse. Kind of looks like hell breaking loose. Yet, the only time we see real emotion is when he is being chased by this faceless white mob as the video fades to black.
Is there any takeaway that Black killings didn’t register any emotion on his face? Should we be concerned that the one time we saw emotion was when he was surrounded by white people?
To be sure, Donald deserves credit for helping America take a break from Kanye West’s public spiral into the sunken place—to be fair, it had to be a really big teacup (miss you Ye). His video revived a conversation about how America trivializes Black trauma. It may have even got us finally talking about how Black trauma is digested as entertainment. As, with any conversation worth reflecting on, it caused America to take sides. Was this artistic reflection of America’s mishandling of Black trauma revolutionary? Was it just Donald’s way of commodifying Black pain and the void America felt from Kanye’s unraveling? I am on pins and needles to hear from Donald himself on what this project means, as I engage in social media’s storm of responses. It is important to note that Donald Glover has not spoken on the criticism he has received from the video and mentioned that he would not.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get long to enjoy what could have been a productive and progressive conversation because, well, someone mentioned a white woman. And mirroring Death’s entrance on a white horse in his video, the death of this conversation rode in with blue eyes and blonde hair.
Donald Glover has a white girlfriend. They have children together. This came as a surprise to many because they have only known Donald Glover for these two amazingly Black years he has had. Enter the well informed. It was in 2014 that Donald released a firestorm of tweets that, viewed now, could be seen as eerily parallel to Kanye’s devolution into Trumpdomness (I’m copywriting that word). Tweets like “Childish Gambino is a white rapper” “I wanna be a white rapper” and “I wanna be so white and so big I get to eat dinner with the Koch brothers.”
Maybe this is satirical, he is a comedian. In 2011, Donald stated during an interview that he didn’t date black girls because he “didn’t like the politics of dating them.’ You might get a clearer look into his head space at that time if you read the lyrics of the song “Not Going Back” from his album Camp. The entire song is a shout-out to every misunderstood young boy who held ideas of entitlement, misogyny, and homophobia. Then there is the time he said being called the N-word by an Armenian girl made him have an intense orgasm. (Seriously, does he want to be Kanye West?)
All of these incidents were funneled back into the current conversation as the counter narrative developed that maybe, just maybe, Childish Gambino isn’t the second coming of Yeezus (well not the version of Yeezus we were hoping for). Then someone added that he had a white girlfriend. You know, if I had a time machine and Liam Neeson’s very particular set of skills, I would look for them, I would find them and I would—take their phone away. People capping for interracial relationships took flight. Overnight, the number of think pieces declaring that the work of the woke is not impacted by the color of their partner tripled, quadrupled the number of pieces addressing America’s voyeuristic relationship with Black trauma and death.
I would like to say bullshit. Humbly, of course. What better proof that being partnered to whiteness can impact the work of POC in interracial relationships than a national conversation being derailed in order to protect a body free from danger? If the point of this video was to talk about the Black condition, how were we so easily led off course? How many didn’t have anything to say until whiteness was encroached?
We saw online, the struggle to center the Black experience on the national stage. Even the foundational idea that this video was made to critique how America, Donald Trump’s America, deals with these issues was countered by the narrative that it is Black people who should stop “partying” and take our own pain more seriously. That Black people finding ways to enjoy an oppressed, violently short life would require critique feels a lot like “400 years? All those people? That sounds like a choice” the visual.
The layered response to the notion that white people could negatively affect POC lives, even if they love them, ensured that the conversation would now put Black people’s trauma and pain on the back burner, where America loves it. The machine of white supremacy is ever present in our lives and minds. Sometimes it clunks noisily, like when police are caught on video beating and killing Black people then planting drugs because they forgot their body cams were rolling. Other times it is well-oiled and runs smoothly like a sly change of topic that puts Blackness on the defense in order to preserve and protect the innocent image of whiteness.
No one cares that Donald Glover is in an interracial relationship. He said himself, no one wanted him anyway. What we do care about is leveraging Black pain for profit, when your personal history proves that you have caused more pain than you have healed.
My hope is that as we think about how to move inherently Black conversation forward with the goal of liberation, we begin to apply the term “distraction” appropriately. We could all work harder to identify the barriers that come with discussing Blackness. Capture the thoughts that support the system of white supremacy and oppression. Spend time being honest that we are all conditioned to oppose Blackness. None of us were missed. Once we acknowledge that, we can begin to consistently combat those thoughts internally, before introducing them on our platforms or on the public stage. First things first.
Suggested Reading
“America’s history exposes how Israel’s “two state solution” is a cover for further land theft“— josh briond and Da’Shaun Harrison, RaceBaitR (May 22, 2018)
“Children of Blood and Bone” — Tomi Adeyemi
JaKeen Fox is a 29 year old social commentator and cultural critic. He hopes to use his writing to encourage and empower Black people to live their Blackest lives, however they intuit that, without apology.
