Childish Gambino appears on screen after a few seconds. Dance steps, catchy music… And a weapon, taken out a few moments later from his back pocket. He fires a bullet in the head of a black man, seated in front of him. “When his character does not dance, he kills“, Write the New Yorker.
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“This is America”, sings Childish Gambino. The rapper from Georgia offers us a one-way ticket to the United States of today, which saw the birth of the “Black Lives Matter” movement against police violence against black people, fifty years later the civil rights movement.
“The video has already been enthusiastically described as a powerful rallying cry against gun violence, a powerful portrait of black American existentialism, a powerful indictment of a culture that circulates videos of black children dying as easily as videos where these same children dance in parking lots”, continues the New Yorker.
“How do you survive being black in America?”
For several American media, the clip evokes the massacre of Charleston in June 2015, when the white supremacist Dylan Roof killed nine faithful of a black church in South Carolina. The local newspaper The Post and Courier asked residents of Charleston about their reaction to the video.
Reverend Sharon Risher, daughter of one of the victims, initially declined to watch the video. She finally delivers her impressions:
It’s really impactful. Sadly, this is America as it appears through the eyes of a young black man. For millions of people, especially young people, who will watch the clip, it makes you think and wonder: how are you going to survive being black in America?”
Le New Yorker concludes: “A lot of black people hated the clip. Glover forces us to relive certain traumas and barely gives us a second to breathe, before forcing us to dance.
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