"This Is America"

This song that really stuck out to me as a present cultural resource is “This is America” by Childish Gambino. The music video for this song helps reimagine how we consume violence and entertainment simultaneously. It forces the viewers to confront what we choose to look at versus what we choose to look away from. The music video itself shows people being shot, representing the culture of gun violence we in America have come to expect. By just casually shooting people in the head, or shooting a group of choir singers, it represents the mass casualties that we have come to expect almost daily, trying to survive in this country. 

The lyrics to the song start out, “We just wanna party, party just for you, we just want the money, money just for you.” This is about consumerism in America and how we are very self-centered as individuals in this country. This video doesn’t imagine any utopia; it imagines what America actually looks like when you strip away all the media distractions. This is the alternative: an America where people aren’t able to look away. The civic imagination here is forcing the viewer to confront reality rather than be entertained by it. The “current condition” is a society that consumes Black culture, such as music, dance, and style. All the while, society ignores Black suffering, such as police brutality, gun violence, and long-standing systemic racism. The “reimagined alternative” is an America that can no longer separate the two. 

This imagined alternative would require both technological and systemic changes. The video is referencing real-world events that showcase a broken system. When he is singing with the choir and then massacres them, this evokes the 2015 Charleston shooting, where a white supremacist massacred nine Black people in a chuch basement. Or the lyric “This a celly, that’s a tool” is referencing Sepheon Clark, who was shot and killed in his grandmother’s backyard because the police mistook his cell phone for a weapon. The video also shows guns being carefully wrapped in red cloth and handled with care after each shooting. The systemic critique here is that America seems to value its weapons more than its people, particularly Black people. I would say this video brings up a policy argument about gun culture being so deeply embedded in the American identity and how change would require a massive, fundamental cultural shift. 

(Thompson, 2021)

Technological changes occur throughout the video as well. In particular, the children video everything on their cellphones. This reflects the culture of documenting violence instead of intervening. Look at all the police brutality incidents we’ve seen that have gone viral, like George Floyd and Eric Garner. Yet, nothing changes. The video also highlights the shortened attention span of our generation. The shifts between gospel and trap, between joy and violence, mirror exactly how we scroll from one mass shooting headline to something like a cat or dance video on social media. The technological change needed isn’t just better platforms; it’s designing technology that encourages reflection rather than endless, mindless scrolling. 

The elements in this video haven’t really changed. We are still mindlessly scrolling. Living with the fear that when going to the mall, we could very well encounter a mass shooting event. The news moves on, day after day. This video imagined an alternative where Americans can’t look away. We consumed this artistic message by Childish Gambino the same way we consume everything else: briefly and intensely, and then we scroll right past it.