It would be difficult to make it through watching This is America by Childish Gambino without feeling impacted. I had previously analyzed this video when it initially came out during my senior year of high school. Throughout my years of high school dance, we often analyzed movement and its impact. Stories can be told through many media, and my dance teacher stressed the importance of meaningful movements. The positioning of props, costumes, music, are all meaningful parts to a story.
Gambino repeats the idea of innocence vs. violence throughout the video. I was initially impacted by the opening scene. A chair and guitar are centered and an African American man walks into frame and sits in the chair. The man is dressed in white and yellow, colors that represent lightness and innocence. What has a man dressed in pastels playing guitar ever done wrong? Likely nothing, and seemingly, that is the point; this man is innocent.
The next scene begins with Childish Gambino, dressed in beige pants and no shirt, walking into frame. His benign attire portrays him as a regular person. He is not Childish Gambino, but rather another black man in today’s America.
jThe man dressed in pastels is sitting in the same chair, now with a bag over his head. He is then shot in the back of the head, an abrupt occurrence- even after my third watch. His body is dragged away by two people and the video just continues. This is representative of a thought within Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Dr. King speaks of his brothers and sisters being lynched and mobbed in the streets. Childish Gambino and Dr. King both utilize pathos by evoking motion in the reader/ watcher. The unforeseen shooting is shocking to see and makes you feel a minuscule fraction of what the people who have lost their family members to gun violence have felt.
At the 1:30 mark, children are seen in collared shirts and uniformed pants. Again, we see the utilization of innocence. Children, education, dancing- none of these things are ones we associate with violence. The children are seen dancing amongst chaos. People are being chased in the background. Police lights are flooding the brightly lit room. The children are quite literally in the middle of the chaos. Again, Gambino is evoking emotion in the viewer to represent the children being in the middle of violence, potentially referring to times we have seen African American parents be shot by the police in front of their children.
We are left with an unsettling ending. Gambino runs frantically, arms flailing, his face staring into the camera. We don’t get the happy ending we often see as the climax is resolved. Really, we are left even more in the dark. If the themes between Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and This is America are so easily connected, has America really changed. It seems as though this was America and this is still America.
The Thoughts of a Sleepless Pre Med Student 