This is Nina Simone’s Pirate Jenny
I think it’s safe to say that things have calmed down slightly since the drop of Donald Glover’s This is America video. It has been critiqued up and down, which is why I’m not going to offer any more insight into what this video means. Whatever has been felt and thought about it has been interpreted in both brilliant and not so brilliant ways.
We all know that art can just be made for the sake of creation, but despite what Gambino/Glover himself says, there had to be an intent behind a work as stirring as this one. As an artist, he just knows that to impose too much of his own views of it directly could limit the vast interpretations and cognitive reach of what he created. He’d be correct in this.
And in an expected yet chaotic fashion, everyone has gone over and over again about how you have to watch the background because you’ll miss something very critical to the message he’s sending about America. Pay no mind to the man staring you right in your face. Luckily, I can walk and chew gum at once, which led me to see beyond both Glover and the carefully orchestrated destruction that framed both the messenger and the message.
After just one sitting, I could not help but wonder what the response to this video would have been if Janelle Monae had chosen to do this in lieu of Dirty Computer. Could you imagine a Black woman, any Black woman, replacing Glover’s character in this video? The image of America’s comfort, the mama. Nurturing the bodies and egos of both babies and men, more often than not simultaneously, knowing that as long as she’s at the bottom having to cradle and coddle society surely she’d never go rogue.
According to what history has shown us there have been countless White men, Black men, and even White women serial killers. But what about the so-called angriest of us all? Why are there no Black women taking out the masses all at once? **Before any of you noteps get started on those anti-abortion Black genocide statistics, systemic oppression in its many forms, namely Black maternal mortality, has taken more Black lives than Black women making choices for themselves ever could, but more on this at another time. Let’s stay focused, shall we?**
I think it’s safe to say that America wouldn’t want those kinds of problems. I am in no way advocating for violence, but I’m simply casting light on all of the ways that so many systems, hierarchies, people, and their egos would simply dry up and die on their own without getting a steady dose of the everlasting sustenance that Black women have provided only to be ignored and abused on countless levels. Aptly put, there would be no America.
Still, we’re here. Just don’t let the day come when we look at one another and ask with smiles on our faces, happily dancing together, asking, “Kill them now or later? Asking… Kill them now or later?”
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