“This is America”

“This Is America” is a rap song by Childish Gambino that tries to inform everyone about problems going on in the world today. The main event that he is trying to inform the audience about is slavery and all types of discrimination against Blacks. The music video provides multiple situations where people are too busy looking at their phones and they don’t pay attention to all the crime and wrong doings of the world. The issues he portrays are social injustice, religious hatred and overall crime levels all over the world. One of his first movements he makes is at :53 when he shoots a Black man and poses as Jim Crow. The Jim Crow laws were segregation laws against Blacks and Childish Gambino shows how awful they really were by comparing them to a Black man being shot. He is hoping to bring awareness to an issue that has been going on for years and needs to stop. At 1:46 he also demonstrates Religious hate. The church choir is singing and out of nowhere he takes out a gun and kills all of them. The choir hasn’t done anything harmful, but people want to kill them just because of their beliefs.He is trying to show all the unnecessary religious hate and does an amazing job of delivering it. At 2:29 he shows people sitting on their phones. Right before that, you can see a bunch of awful things happening in the video and these people seem oblivious to all that is going on. He tries to show the importance of knowing what is going on in the world and that not being informed is a huge part of the problem. Throughout the video there are multiple cop cars on fire and there are always people running from something or fighting. He provides very gruesome scenes of people getting shot and even someone commiting suicide. (2:12) The crime rates in the world are very high and Childish Gambino tries to bring awareness to that. Another interesting part of the video is that the whole time Childish Gambino is wearing the military pants for the confederate army. This is where he tries to inform the audience about slavery. He specifically wears confederate pants because the south was where slavery occured. He performs all the shootings while wearing these pants to give a comparison to how bad slavery really was. The last 30 seconds of the music video show Childish Gambino running from something. The background is dark and the audience can’t really see what he is running from. He is trying to show that Black men are always running from something and never feel safe. There is so much more about this video that the audience can learn from. He does an amazing job of getting the audience’s attention and Informing them about some of the biggest problems in today’s world.