‘This is America. This is America.’ Watch this in-your-face rap video (4 mins). Plus Hidden Meanings (4 mins 50 secs). Plus young Black reactions (6 mins)
This is America. This is America.
Take a deep look at this intimidating video commentary on the violent state of America.
Full screen.
Then watch the Hidden Meanings.
Then watch the view of some young Black Americans.
Then watch the rap video again.
Face this gaudy spectacle with its presentation of black singers and school age movers used to entertain the world while obscuring the daily horrors, the violence, and the killings in America.
Pleasure is in your face with the slinky and intimidating moves of Donald Glover (musical pseudonym Childish Gambino), who struts the floor of the warehouse in the video while he displays with regularity a chilling grin and a deadly grimace.
Stripped to the waist Glover is a frantic and merciless chaos which reveals a society saturated with conflict. The killer treats his gun and rifle with care and loving respect, as he mindfully places it in a blood red cloth, after his assassination of a chair bound individual and the mowing down of a gospel choir.
Viewers never know what will happen next. Then you begin to realise the madness in the duality of pleasure and pain with entertainment and murder fused together.
This is America.
This is America shows a spectacle of terror – largely unexamined, neglected and deeply troubling. You wonder if anything much has changed in the attitudes towards and punishments of the Afro-American community, since the the time of the British occupation when they forcibly kidnapped millions of slaves from Africa to serve their colonial ends.
Whites must take responsibility for the endless killings. Blacks must take responsibility for the endless killings while the rapper dances on the bonnet of the blood red car.
The police car, the white horse. the youngsters lost in a cell (mobile phone) and the desperate flight of the singer at the end of rap from the pursuit of angry whites displays the ongoing vitriolic and bleak situation of the ‘cast’ in ‘This is America.’
With America today run by a far-right extremist President and a clique of billionaires, the racism and street warfare will continue into the foreseeable future.
This is America. This is America.
Wake up America.
PS. My four beautiful grandchildren have Anglo-Caribbean-African roots.