Wednesday 9 May 2018

Childish Gambino | The Use of Imagery and Symbolism Within This Is America


Childish Gambino recently released This Is America. The music video to the song is full of symbolism that I felt was too important not to write about. The video is layered with imagery that contain heavy meaning and messages. The video reflects on the social issues we’re dealing with in 2018, Donald Glover has created what is arguably the most important music video of our generation. Glover is addressing the horrifying truth that is the American Reality, This Is America highlights racism and discrimination, police brutality, social media and black culture.

The video does not waste a second, every frame is full of details of substance that are forcing these social problems into discussion within the media.

In the opening after Donald shoots the man from the back of the head, he hands his gun carefully for someone waiting to take it off him, waiting with a cloth so their skin doesn’t touch it. This is reflecting on the idea that a gun is worth more than human life. In opposition to this, the human body is dragged out of the shot like nothing more than a heavy bin bag. This careful handling of guns is repeated throughout the video. Every time a shooting takes place the gun is removed with great care, always handled with a cloth as though it is an important religious object. Arguably you could go as far to say that Glover is stating America worships guns, in it’s refusal to change gun laws, America has decided that guns are more important than the lives of it’s citizens.




The choir scene is a representation of the Charleston Mass massacre, in which white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African American’s in South Carolina in 2015. The shooting took place at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal which is one of the oldest black churches in America. There is also 17 seconds of silence during the video, many of Childish Gambino’s fans have debated if this is a moment of silence for the 17 innocent students whose lives were taken from them in the Parkland shootings. I would suspect so as further point to draw awareness to need for change in America’s gun laws. 17 seconds is a long stretch of silence within a music video. Enough to make you stop and wonder if the song has finished. Silence is often louder than words.



There is also historical symbolism within the video. ‘Jim Crow’ is the most noticeable, a reference to exploiting black culture for the sake of entertainment. The origins of Jim Crow have been lost to time, but the term is generally recognized a derogatory character, performed by a white performer who would put on ‘black face’ at the exploitation of freed black slaves. Mocking African Americas and segregation for the sake of entertainment for white people. The term Jim Crow became so popular it transformed into the Jim Crow Law’s, aka the apartheid system. Between the late 1800s up until the 1960’s Jim Crow was a racial caste system of anti-black laws that operated mainly (but not solely) in the Southern states.














The scene in which Donald dances with the young adults in school uniform is overloaded with imagery and messages. Behind the dancing and the smiles, the room is full of violence. As a viewer your eyes are drawn to the dancing, you barely notice the chaos in the back ground, this is representative of the worlds willingness to embrace and glorify black culture and entertainment, whilst continuing to turn a blind eye to the horrifying amount of racial injustices that the same people are still facing day to day.




Once again our eyes are too distracted by the dancing to notice the black hooded figure that rides a white horse, iconic imagery to the book of Revelations. “I looked, and there was a pale horse, and its rider's name was Death. Hell followed him.” It’s easy to translate the message here, the simplicity that we’re being overwhelmed with death. 



In the same scene, the room is filled with police brutality. In recent years more and more forms of entertainment are trying to open the eyes of its viewers to the reality of police brutality and discrimination that black citizens receive.  Racial profiling from police is also brought into the video towards the end, when Donald is dancing on top of the car, when the camera moves out we see there are a lot of cars around him. All with their doors hanging open on the driver’s side, a subtle reference to innocent black people being pulled over by police for nothing more than the colour of their skin.

The school children recording the scenes on their phones references the use of live streams in police shootings, Donald’s lyrics “this is a celly, that’s a tool”. A reminder that our phones are a quick access to our ability to document the reality around us, a way to capture and exploit the truth. Yet this is often not the case, in a generation obsessed with social media we have become obsessed with doing anything for online attention. The children recording this brutality have cloths over their mouths, a metaphor to the silence of online users who capture these moments of violence. They’re quick to take a video for the sake of views and 10 minutes of in the spot light but they take no action to help.



In the closing of the video, Donald is running through a darkly lit underground room. This scene also appears to take inspiration from the sunken place in the film ‘Get Out’. After a few seconds of Donald running, we see that he is being chased, though the figures are out of focus we are able to make out they are white. This quite simply shows that African American’s and black people all over the world, still have a fear of white people. And how could they not when so much racial hate crime has risen?



There is more imagery and symbolism I haven’t touched on or have probably missed. But overall these are the moments that really stuck out for me. In 2018 it’s heart breaking that we still face all of these problems and so many more. But I believe in our generation to try and fight for change. We have to speak out and fight for equality in every way possible, seeing Donald Grover use his art form to create something so powerful is a huge step in bringing these topics into discussion within the media.


Article written by Holly Beson-Tams

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