‘This Is America’ Is the New Minstrel Show
“Donald Glover’s music video “This Is America” attracted 7.2 million views in one day, when it went viral after its release Friday. That record-setting number suggests a sort of online plebiscite, and yet it’s hard to take Glover seriously. His four-minute piece combines rapping, dancing, and violence into deliberately theatrical agitprop,
“For those who remember that rich period of soul-music renaissance, the exhibition of black folks raving and ranting in This Is America is little more than a pale distortion of Mayfield’s truly provocative album cover for There’s No Place Like America Today. Mayfield repurposed Margaret Bourke-White’s 1937 photo of blacks standing in a Depression-era food line, beneath a billboard depicting a prosperous white family. Mayfield flipped cultural nostalgia to show his exclusion from it. But Gambino-Glover’s nostalgia for the civil-rights-era version is uninformed by reality. His pop-culture disillusionment is warped by the disoriented expectations black Americans felt during the Obama era, which, now, has led to the bewilderment of some during the Trump era (despite Trump’s having served as a heroic capitalist icon for hip-hop artists before his presidential election).
“Gambino-Glover’s video takes place on a soundstage. It’s an insular and patronizing location for a blackface performance that, ironically, evokes the antique graphics of the first white minstrels, such as Theodore Dartmouth (T. D.) Rice, who originated the Jim Crow figure. Scholars Eric Lott and William T. Lhamon (in their respective studies Love and Theft and Jump Jim Crow) described the history behind the Jim Crow stereotype that eventually named the period of “separate but equal” segregation, which did not end until the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
‘This Is America’ leeches from the civil-rights past to validate today’s marketable discontent.
No matter how popular “This Is America” is for the moment, it is the work of an ideologically crippled pop star — and proof that contemporary black popular culture has a crippled sense of history.
“This Is America” leeches from the civil-rights past to validate today’s marketable discontent. It hasn’t shaken the culture the way Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” music video did when it debuted simultaneously on several TV networks in 1991, with a premiere audience estimated at 500 million. Jackson’s controversial coda, in which he morphed into a black panther to portray his personal and political rage, was a high point in black pop, as daring as anything in then-ascendant hip-hop.
Decades later, Beyoncé’s Lemonade music videos set an egregious standard of excessive cultural exploitation. Beyoncé’s pseudo-Afrocentric posturing defined how this new form of music-video minstrelsy could revive Jim Crow segregation through a pop star’s distanced emphasis on black grievance and high-art artifice. Gambino-Glover continues this artsy phase of segregation. Only black faces appear in the video until its final scene.
What does that all mean? Simply that the mixed messages in “This Is America” are superficial. They allude to race-based catastrophes without explanation, therefore without justification, … just a pop artist’s sanctimony. This spectacle of American chaos is vague and safely “radical.” Its style of eternal paranoia keeps viewers from thinking. They can, instead, fantasize that clicking on Glover’s squandering of black cultural and political history equates to a militant political act. It doesn’t. Minstrelsy.
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