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Racism And Corruption In Donald Glover's 'This Is America'

908 Words4 Pages

William Puncher 02/03/2023 ENG4U American culture and social state is mired in racism and corruption. In this essay, Donald Glover’s This is America will be analyzed using critical race theory. Through this analysis, this essay will show how Donald Glover’s “This is America” highlights that the treatment of black people in America is unjust and violently racist. America, the land of stereotypes, truly likes to group all of its people into categories. One of the main problems with these categories is how they are used and abused. “Don’t catch you slippin’ now, look how I’m livin’ now, police be trippin’ now” (Glover 1:11) is one of the first lines in the song and immediately shows the problem of the media piece. Through this lyric …show more content…

One such example takes the form of hate crimes, acts against a specific group for little more reason than because the perpetrator disliked the victims. In the song, a black choir is gunned down which represents a similar hate crime that occurred in Charleston. This real world counterpart involved the shooting of a black church by a white man who believed himself better than black people. Further mistreatment of black people is also shown in the music video. Twice in the video, guns are brandished against black men, twice the guns are treated better than the innocent corpses as they are carried away on red cloth while the corpse of the guitar player is seen being dragged ofscreen. Hateful treatment of black people leads to outrage which leads to protests which through further hate devolves to riots. In the music video, a rider in black hooded cloak rides a pale horse through the background during one such riot. This alludes to the unjust deaths of innocent black protestors due to hate and police brutality. Even with all of these horrendous things happening, most people do nothing to help, even though they have the means to do so. In the song Glover sings the lyric, “This is a celly, That's a tool” (Glover 2:22) by saying this he is trying to convey that, since most people have a cellphone, they should use them to try and get the

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