This is (Black Neoliberal) America
On Donald Glover, The Abuse of Black Trauma, and the Failing Politics of Representation
Donald Glover is undeniably talented, and probably always has been. He has shown a considerable range of skill writing, comedy, rapping, singing, dancing, acting, and producing. His meteoric rise to fame over the last decade is likely due in part to this.
Donald Glover is also a dangerous sociopath, and it has never been more evident than this past Sunday.
This is America; This is Exploitation
In the middle of the night following his appearance on Saturday Night Live, he released the music video for This is America. In the video, a greasy shirtless Glover prances around from scene to scene, with goofy and almost effeminate mannerisms peppered in. (This is standard issue cishet male comedian shorthand. If you want some want something to look ridiculous, make it look gay.) He also does popular black American dances and popular continental African dances with teenagers in what look like stereotypical African school children uniforms. Seemingly, he is revelling in the increasing chaos surrounding him.
He also murders multiple black people in effigy, without warning or care. In one scene he shoots a black man, hooded and tied to a chair, in the back of the head. In another, he mows down a singing and dancing black church choir with a machine gun. It is sudden, ghastly, and wholly unnecessary. And Glover has the tactless gall to make light of it.
To be very honest, I only saw gifs of the video. That was more than enough for me. When I saw the aforementioned images specifically, I was viscerally and violently triggered. I could not believe that Glover not only thought this was good conceptually, but filmed edited and released it. It takes a horrifying lack of empathy to do that Glover likely intended it to be political commentary. But his intention means nothing the face of what he did: The callous use of real black trauma as cheap shock value. In a world where we are bombarded with images of black people being brutalized and murdered almost daily, Glover decided to capitalized on that trauma in a way that was cruel and unfeeling, and blatantly so. I still have not recovered from what I saw, and I imagine there a great many black people who have not either. My heart goes out to the AME community of Charleston, SC, who woke up Sunday morning to see a disaffected black celebrity use the tragedy of their family and friends’ deaths as cheap “gotcha!” in a music video. More than anything, I hurt for them in the midst of all of this.
What hurts almost as much is the praise that this is receiving. Not only is Glover’s flippant retraumatization of black people seen as acceptable, but it is seen as exceptional. He is being called a genius for making glib trauma porn with black bodies. One reviewer called it “high art” that needs time to be fully understood. Another posted a glittering review comparing it to A Clockwork Orange, that it’s use of traumatic imagery is a thing to be respected and commended. Never did I think emulating the white male violence in both the production and product of A Clockwork Orange would be considered a revolutionary thing for a black man review. In an especially heartless point, the reviewer praised Glover’s juxtaposition of dancing African children with his on-screen murder of black people, saying that tying those together was a stroke of genius. A horrible take, one that implies that the joy of black children anywhere should be overshadowed by imagery of black death here. This reviewer was not the first one who made such intimations, and likely won’t be the last.
Both This is America and the praise it is receiving are triggering and vile. But the aftermath is also incredibly disheartening. Glover blatantly exploited black people’s tragedy and trauma, abused us on a national scale, and made a profit from it. I’m having difficulty putting into words how awful that is, and how depressing to see that he is receiving accolades for cheapening anti-black violence. The mental/emotional health of thousands of black people was sacrificed on the altar of Donald Glover’s “wokeness”, and so many “pro-black people” let him do it. There is no challenge whatsoever to white supremacy. In fact, the video caters to the voyeuristic white gaze. All it does is make white liberal allies feel good about themselves, while the supposed message is lost entirely on everyone else. There is no “deep” message to be found, no depth at all. The video is little more than shock factor and continued neoliberal exploitation of black trauma. Glover is bringing serious attention to no issue but his own self-importance. Even so, Glover is being hoisted up on the shoulders of fans too stupid to realize that sometimes a cigar is just a fucking cigar.
Legacy of the Blue Vest
I do acknowledge Glover’s video doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though. Instead it is the culmination of nearly four years of widespread desensitization of black people to our own pain. Glover is only the latest to use black death and pain to build his own career. I attribute the flippancy with which he showed ultraviolence against black bodies to the legacy of DeRay McKesson and Shaun King. Both men who, in tandem until recently, built their careers almost entirely off the distribution of videos and images of black people dying at the hands of police. Before 2014, it was rare that people would pass around snuff films of any kind in general online spaces. In late 2014, my first time seeing a viral tweet from McKesson was one where he demanded that people watch the video of Kajieme Powell’s murder. Shaun King was even worse, posting even more police brutality videos than McKesson. Together they normalized the idea that seeing black people die was not only acceptable, but even necessary. If you claimed to care that Black Lives Matter, if you were “woke” you had to be willing and able to watch us bleed and die. They also believed that this would shock white people into caring about us. This philosophy was devoid of empathy, and in direct contradiction to the supposed care these men had for black people. Again, the health of black people was acceptable collateral damage to the performance of resistance/activism. It also implied that those of us who refused to watch people who looked like us be hurt and kill were weak-willed or uncaring. These men, along with their thousands of followers, made legitimate empathy for black people and continued sensitivity to black pain seem like a fatal flaw. Unfortunately, when they heard the warnings of desensitization and complaints of sensationalism, they dug in their heels. McKesson told me directly that I was “just looking for a fight” when I confronted him about posting two police virally disseminating two police brutality videos in the course of 24 hours without warning. Thus, this was the case for nearly three years: A black person would be killed by police, and as soon as the dashcam or bodycam video was released, it would be everywhere. It became so normalized that soon news stations, now believing this was acceptable behavior, would play the videos uncensored on their stations. It became normal to see a black person die on screen.
More recently, the viral spread of videos of black people dying has decreased significantly. When they are made available, people are now more sensitive to the effects of throwing death on the newsfeed, timeline, dashboard without warnings or filters. For those of us who have been fighting this trend from the beginning, it is frustrating that it took so long. We still have to occasionally remind people that any images of anti-black violence, even non-lethal, are not okay to spread virally. Until Sunday, I thought we had finally achieved a general consensus that black people, living and dead, deserved respect and care.
When Glover released his video, however, that belief was promptly and violently thrown out the window. Black people have never had to see our people die to believe it. But Donald Glover willfully ignores that, reducing dead black bodies to shallow, pseudo-intellectual artistic fodder that says “makes you think, huh?” As if we aren’t already thinking of it. As if we can ever stop thinking of it. Glover’s artistic sociopolitical “genius” is akin to that of Banksy’s. Both artistically talented, but both only offer teaspoon-deep social commentary that it only impressive to the perpetually clueless. Except Glover is worse than Banksy; to my knowledge, Banksy has yet to abuse black people with violent imagery to make his points. Glover draws from the same legacy of sensationalizing black death as a performance of “wokeness”. He is climbing his personal career ladder in the same way as McKesson and King, sociopathic opportunism is bathed in seas of black blood and tears. Despite the foolish and sycophantic fan interpretations of his video, Donald Glover does not care about black people.
Glover v. West v. Coates
One of the outcomes of the video’s release is that Glover is being compared to Kanye West. West, as most of us know, has gone a tear for the last month or so. His tweets and public statements have become increasingly more and more erratic, culminating in his suggesting that slavery was a choice and receiving praise from Donald Trump. Rightfully, many public figures and private fans distanced themselves from him. Even the entry-level #StayWokeFolks who defended him in the past had difficulty maintaining their positions. A great many have published articles, tweet-threads, and think-pieces about West’s fall from gross. Most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates published an article about him title “I’m not black. I’m Kanye” (more on that later). In contrast, especially after the release of the This is America music video, media pundits and twitter denizens alike have praised Glover as the salve to West’s foolishness. Some even went so far as to call Glover, to paraphrase, the genius we all thought West was. This is all done without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness. How is it that so many people lambaste West and praise Glover in the same week for doing the exact same thing? Glover is simply filling a power vacuum left by West. The same people were just self-flagellating for inappropriately holding West in high regard are willing to repeat the same process with Glover without hesitation. I’m not suggesting that Glover is doomed to become in the future what Kanye West has become now. Instead, I’m saying that he already is that person.
Part of the issue is that people don’t seem to realize that Kanye West was never really pro-black. He was, and is, pro-Kanye West. He thrives on attention, and was willing to align with whatever got him the most. He is a contrarian to the core, relying on uproar, outrage, and emotional responses of the collective to generate attention and revenue. Retrospectively, every one of West’s stunts has gotten increasingly ridiculous and severe, tailored solely to get a rise out of others. When he said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” it was a stunt, not him vouching for black people. When he ran interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech it was the same thing. When he perverted “Strange Leaves”, and stripped it of it significance. When he vouched for Donald Trump. All the same, again and again and again. West has been the same obnoxious person for nearly fifteen years, turning on a dime to what gets the most people talking. He has learned recently that aligning with alt-right talking points (“free thought” and such) gets him attention, and tweeting and speaking wildly and erratically well get people talking and keep people talking. Getting West out the paint is long overdue, but it is foolish to praise Glover at the same time for the same reasons
Like West, Glover has realized that appreciation from black people is en vogue and very profitable. Like West, he is willing to settle for black attention, so long as there is a lot of it. Like West, Glover has dealt with mental health issues, but has no qualms with damaging black mental health collectively. Like West, Glover has shown that the painful history of black people in this country can be trivialized or sensationalized to turn a profit. (For God’s sake, people are making reaction videos for This Is America. Black trauma is reduced cheap jump scare. Is that what he wanted?) Like West, Glover’s opportunistic and borderline abusive tendencies are celebrated as genius simply because they (very loosely) align with most black people. Like West, Glover’s behavior, which should considered as obvious disregard for black people, is twisted into “high, provocative art” by the cult of personality surrounding him. The supposed gulf between the two men is actually a very fragile line, a thin veil. The only difference between then is Glover’s fragile pretense of performative advocacy, one that West has long since dropped.
People moving from the castigation of West to the exaltation of Glover would be funny, if it wasn’t so maddeningly frustrating. It’s signals a collective of lack of self-awareness that is evergreen in black neoliberals, who would quickly ridicule white people who made similar choices about white celebrities. This never more glaring than it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently left twitter after being publicly confronted about his own shallow politics by Cornel West. This week, Coates wrote a piece criticizing Kanye West’s recent words and actions, his alignment with Trump, as well as the damage these things do to black people on a public scale. The same man will probably write some flowery and verbose puff piece in the coming weeks (if he hasn’t already) praising the avant-garde talents of Donald Glover. Coates, in all is supposed political awareness, fails to see that not only are Glover and West the same, but so is he. Coates also fails to see the irony in using one abusive man’s words to chastise another. In recent weeks, Coates defended the hiring of a man who, among other bigoted writing, publicly attacked a black transgender woman and stated that abortion should be punishable by hanging. Coates’ logic was that the man was a good writer, and that he would like to opportunity to publicly debate him and debunk him within the confines of their publication. Like Kanye West and Donald Glover, Coates believed that the mental and emotional health and safety of black people in his surroundings were secondary to his self-aggrandizing performance of wokeness for the white (and basic black liberal) gaze. In fact, Coates showed a distinct and explicit disregard for black women specifically, just as West and Glover have made a constant of their careers, even now. Coates gave a weak apology to the cis women at the Atlantic for his support of the man, but immediately walked it back by continuing to marvel at the man’s prose. He said nothing at all to address the transantagonism. Like Kanye, Coates was freely willing to associate with and entertain white supremacy for the sake of attention and ego. All three men claim or claimed to be pro-black, but regularly mine black pain and outrage for their career advancement. When the opportunity arises, they are more than willing to espouse damaging politics or sacrifice black safety/health for their own glory. All three men are hailed as genius by the easily-impressed and perpetually clueless, like cheap rhinestones thought to be precious diamonds by ignorant children. And they aren’t the only ones.
The Curse of Black Millennial Creator-Celebrities
Donald Glover, along with Ta-Nehisi Coates and even Kanye West, are part of a larger issue. In thinking about this I realized that I could not criticize Glover without also criticizing the system and social position from which he benefits. Glover is part of this group of upper crust buppie (black yuppies) creative class that dominates the young black entertainment scene. Unfortunately, they have become the arbiters of blackness and social awareness in entertainment, despite having very little to offer in that regard. Despite securing an image as the underdogs, they either come from relative privilege or have since lost touch with humble upbringings. Their politics are (neo)liberal, but laughably shallow and static. Their blackness is more of a brand than a community identity. This grants them erroneous legitimacy in conversations and spaces, where it would otherwise be glaringly obvious that they lack the intellectual, empathic, or experiential range to participate in. Thus their engagement with social issues waxes and wanes, with what is popular and profitable. Glover, for example, did not begin to perform pro-blackness until it was guaranteed to make him money. Like Glover, and because of their secured position within the collective black liberal consciousness, they are nearly impossible to hold accountable for harm done.
It should be no mystery to whom I’m referring: millennial black celebrities who take “unapologetic blackness” to mean “I’m black, so I don’t apologize”. Unrepentant, uncaring, and unaccountable. I’m referring to Issa Rae, who despite been called out multiple times for stepping on others, has never issued an apology that wasn’t coupled with dismissive sarcasm. I mean Luvvie Ajayi, who has put her foot in her mouth so often in the last three years, you would think she’s developing a taste for it. Like Rae, Ajayi’s apologies are often condition (“if sorry, if…”) but incomplete. I mean Justin Simien, who despite being a gay black man from the south, has shown so little sociopolitical growth over the last five years that it’s a wonder he can string a sentence together, much less write a show. He is a man so enamored with low-tier white rage at his show’s title, that he has continually ignored black people’s critiques of his work. I mean Todrick Hall, who built his career ridiculing black people, but is now lodging strawman complaints that black people are questioning his blackness. Who instead of giving an apology to black people for his actions, implicitly demanded one from black people. And finally Donald Glover, always grating and a bit annoying. He is a man who has gone from distancing himself from blackness altogether to violently throwing our trauma in our faces in a desperate,condescending performance of wokeness. These people are capitalists, in every definition of the word. They are continually exploitative, even when wearing a supposedly kind or familiar face. Like corporations or capitalists entities, they don’t learn or grow or improve unless it serves their brand. Like corporations, they don’t apologize or make amends when harm is done. They simply rebrand.
And we let them.
The Failure of Representational Politics.
The reason we put up collectively (though to varying degrees) with the regular trespasses of black millennial celebrities and creators is because of our desperation for representation. I’ve mentioned in other pieces I’ve written about how white supremacy also creates an environment of intraracial cruelty and abuse because those structures of dominance are reproduced at every level. This is one way: We wanted so badly to see people with faces like ours speak and create, that we chose to minimize the damage that they did and do. Seeing them move from the start of their careers to now was inspiring for so many, that we ignored their rise was due in part to having politics that are performative, but effectively useless. We ignored the fact that we put people who already came from privilege on pedestals. We replaced white creators who ignored us with black creators who use us. Some of us realized eventually that representation is not revolution, or even resistance. But by the time we did, these people were already established. Too late did we realize that black millennial celebrities are about as useful to black liberation as black police officers or black military. That is to say, they are little more than parts of, and sometime joyful participants in, institutions built on anti-black violence. Worse still, their places in the social hierarchy are cemented by those whose politics stagnated the same way these celebrities have.
A substantial part of the reason that we cannot ever hold celebrities accountable, or avoid widespread harm like that done by Glover, is because we have to deal with obnoxious, eternally daft Easily-Impressed Black Liberals (EIBL). We know who they are, though I’m not sure they have the self awareness to know themselves. In fact some point in every left-of-center black person’s political journey, they are an EIBL. They are the ones whose political education stagnated in their 201 Sociology class, but believe they know all that there is to know about inequality and social justice. They know the buzzwords, but rarely pay attention to the origins of the concepts. They still believe Obama is awesome (yikes!) They are the ones to “yaaaass” at every entry-level, straight-from-the-tl zinger on tv. They legitimately think She’s Gotta Have It and Dear White People have any sociopolitical value beyond basic representation and pithy entertainment. The longest and most politically charged books they have read are New Jim Crow, Racism without Racists, or some long-winded drivel by Ta-Nehisi Coates. They swear they are a smart as, or even smarter than, every person in any given room. It’s an obnoxious phase, for sure. But the issue rise when it not a phase. To be an EIBL as a college sophomore is expected. To be one at 30, at 40, or older is a cause for concern. For too many black (neo)liberals, it is the norm. To clap like a walrus every time black person does something on screen, to be dazzled by something written at the adolescent level, is nothing short of pathetic and unhelpful. We all created the problem of representation by any means necessary, but EIBLs maintain and exacerbate it.
The Price We Pay
We are partly to blame for the monster that is Donald Glover. No we did not create him, and his actions are entirely his own. But we supported him, nurtured him, and defended him against white people, and cheered for him. All of this done without ever holding him fully accountable for his actions. Not his fetishism of Asian women, not his continual degradation of any black women darker than the palms of his hands, and now not for his blatant disregard for black tragedy and trauma. At every stage he was chided, but never faced any consequences. As stated before, he simply rebranded. Now, like a destructive child or increasingly abusive partner, Glover is testing his boundaries, seeing what he can get away with. This week, the man learned that he can murder black people in effigy, flippantly evoke traumatic memories, blatantly disrespect the tragedy of the AME massacre, juxtapose all that with images of dancing African children, and be praised for it. Nothing good can come of that. This how monsters become a protected class in our community.
What terrifies me about the inappropriate positive feedback for This is America is that it sets a precedent for other black artists to do the same. Want attention, album sales, site traffic? Apparently, you have to do is film glib ultraviolence with black bodies, do collective real violence to black psyches and legacies, sprinkle in some random chaos, and sit back. EIBLs will sing your praise and make high art mountains out of your trauma porn molehill.
This is Black Neoliberal America, where the only way to address the trauma of the black experience is to directly add to that trauma.
This is Black Neoliberal America, where we protect our monsters and ignore all the signs of their violent sociopathy.
This is Black Neoliberal America, where black mental health matters, except when a celebrity wants to perform wokeness.
This is Black Neoliberal America, where to be anti-intellectual and insensitive is not only expected in “activist” spaces and rhetoric, but required.
What I find especially disheartening is that Glover is being lionized to rhetorical invulnerability by a community that should be well-versed with the pitfalls of doing such a thing. Junot Diaz’ victims went silent for so long because they saw that the community valued the representation of an Afro-Latino writer over the pain of the victims. The same with the victims Bill Cosby, who was protected for 40 years because he was “Black America’s dad”. The same with R. Kelly. The same with Nas. Over and over and over. It seems like no one is learning, and when black people who harmed by these powerful, highly-valued people step forward they are shouted or sealioned into silence. And the same will be done with Donald Glover, as well all these other black millennial creator celebrities. How do I know?
Because it’s happening as we speak. Donald Glover abused the memory of the AME, abused the trauma of extrajudicial executions, and deliberately worsened the mental/emotional of hundreds, if not thousands, of black people.
When people defend him, they defend an abuser.
What do we do now?
I don’t have a complete answer for that, unfortunately. As I said before, when I saw the video I was violently triggered. Donald Glover, 4chan-denizen-in-blackface that he is, would likely find that pathetic or hilarious. My anxiety this week was the worst is has been in almost four years. It did not help that this was finals week. I had complete final essays and take final exams, all while fighting headaches, trying to calm a pounding heart rate, and shut out intrusive thoughts images of black people being gunned down. This likely had tangible effects on the quality of my work, but more importantly it negatively impacted by mental health. I still haven’t fully recovered. At this point, just the sight of Glover’s face sends my anxiety into overdrive. With the anxiety, came the depression that is usually triggered by gross denials of empathy. I started to question the worth of my work, and of my own journey in advocacy and activism. More than once, I asked myself what the point of any of this was. Just like when I wrote 4:44 Effect and Nate Parker: Toxic Black Man, I felt powerless to change anything. I still do.
Somehow, I doubt I was the only black person hurt by This is America. If you are one of those people, my heart goes out to your. You deserve better than be remotely abused by a celebrity who couldn’t care less about the wellbeing of black people who aren’t lining his pockets. But, I also know that I am not alone in knowing that Donald Glover is wrong in what he has done. In that, I take solace. There is still the concern with undoing the overvaluation of the representation politics that allowed Glover to do damage with such uanabased hubris. That takes much longer and is more difficult to process in addition to managing your mental health It’s very hard not to become disillusioned and dispassionate in the midst of post-TIA fallout. It’s hard not to give up. It’s hard not to resign yourself to patiently waiting for these people to die or fade into obscurity, and hope they are replaced with someone smarter and more empathic. It’s hard to realize some of your heroes or inspirations pale in comparison to what you thought they were. For me it was not surprising that people like Luvvie Ajayi and Justin Simien rushed to offer their pseudo-intellectual, but predictably vacuous, praise for Glover. I was, however, hurt to see people I respected like Barry Jenkins and Lena Waithe. I’ve sung Barry’s praises before, but this isn’t the first time that he has been thoughtless or ignorant in his rush to applaud something. Lena Waithe’s support was a surprise too, though it really shouldn’t have been.
All this means is that I’m still unlearning my own habits with the overvaluation of representation. Many of us are. At the core of all of this, we have to understand the shortcomings of identity politics. While you cannot separate someone from their identity, you also cannot assume the depth or complexity of someone’s politics because of their identity. The black millennial creator-celebrities are a diverse cohort, featuring (cisgender) men and women, hetero and queer. (Transgender folks are absent from this black gentry class. Based on the thinly-veiled transantagonism of Glover, Rae, Ajayi, and more recently Coates, this is not surprising). However, their politics, as illustrated this past Sunday leave much to be desired, due in part to a class position that is often conveniently ignored. I have to remind myself that visibility as a black celebrity has nothing to do with viability as black leader. I would charge those who are reading this to consider the same. Remember that we cannot expect celebrities least affected by anti-black white supremacy to care in any real way about those most directly affected. Remember are more overseer than advocate, more opportunist than activist, more capitalist than caretaker. We definitely deserve better than the monsters who hurt us and benefit from our trauma like Glover. But we can’t expect anything helpful or revolutionary from someone in that position. We can’t afford to wait for them to do the right thing. It’s nice to be seen, but that doesn’t make us free.
We have no heroes but ourselves.
