ENC1101 Paper #2 Analysize PDF

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ENC1101 Prof. Mears, Schemmeka Mauro M. Larreal Analysis on “This Is America” by Childish Gambino Has it ever happen to your person or someone close to you is at the receiving end of hateful commentary’s for the simplest of reasons such as being a different skin tone from the majority? Or maybe your idea of gender that represents you is looked down upon? This may or may not be your case, but it is most certainly the case of many individuals in our society. Hatred, lies, stereotypes, and simple misconceptions about all genders and races have grown without check in our contemporary society, in the past this was involved in unlucky personal interactions with the wrong people in the wrong time, that could lead to confrontation about one’s religion, idea of gender, or even aspects you don’t get to choose such as your racial features, but in a more contemporary era we elect more indirect routes to insult someone because in this way we may still deal a significant strike to another person without suffering the consequences; we can observes these methods constantly used in media such as news, TV shows, videos, social media, and another million ways one cannot imagine, but in some cases the same media can be used to communicate to the masses for alerting them from the same dilemmas, such is the case of famous artist Childish Gambino. Violence to individuals of dark skin tone, evolution of society to ignore violence, and the continuous straddles of contradictions in our culture are the three main messages that are observed in the official music video and its lyrics of “This is America” by artist Childish Gambino.

The constant violence to individuals considered “Black” is the first and most relevant message against an individual’s racial trait. Since the very opening of the music video we can hear the melodic voice of what appears to be an African chorus, the video progresses slowly, after that a few seconds in the protagonist of the video simply changes from a happy pace to a violent face and swiftly executes a dark skinned man who apparently did nothing to provoke him; we can observe other images like this throughout the video such as when the protagonist massacres a dark skinned choir group from a church, apparently this last event is tied as a reference to 2015 Charleston massacre by white supremacist Dylaan Roof. All of these very graphical and violent content was intended since the very start of the video to promote awareness of violence to one’s racial ethnicity, especially against individuals of dark skin tone. The video continues to demonstrate other themes that are also based on mass shootings and black slavery in the 19th century. The second most relevant message in the video is to raise awareness on the evolution of society to ignore violence in general. One of the pillars of the video to set a tone of ignore from modern society to violence is while the song in playing the aggressive protagonist is dancing happily with high school students around him not only that, but the dance crew is doing so while in the background it appears like someone opened Pandora’s box saying so by all the violence happening, such as murders, police excessive use of force, cars on fire, and thief’s running in all directions. The video strengthens this point by occasionally showing bystanders just observing and filming all of these events. All of these images and actions realized in the video are to raise awareness of our society’s growing ignorance to acknowledge violent acts that happen in a daily basis, and a side effect of this is the growing necessity of us as a person to protect ourselves and the ones we love thru acts of violence.

The third most relevant message is the continuous straddle of our culture and identity. The video leaves this as a more subliminal message but still very present, the very first change in this is the change of music at the start of the video at first is a melodic African style song, but after that the music changes to a more hip hop/rap style song, but after the change in pace we can observe how the protagonist dances to a famous African dance called gwara gwara with a rap rhythm that vastly contrasts everything the dance states. This is image that sets perfectly in the theme creating contrast between various images demonstrating how are society and ourselves lack the self-awareness to protect our ideals and core values. In conclusion, Childish Gambino’s music video of “This Is America” is a perfect representation of what our society condemns in our racial, gender ideal, or religious position to raise awareness of this problems and avoid further contamination of young minds, by doing this we can develop more self-aware and comprehensive individuals for further advancement in our society as one massive alliance of cultures and not just a constant war band seeking to control one another. Childish Gambino truly to let us understand this thru his music....