"This is America" is a music video released last Saturday by Donald Glover, AKA Childish Gambino.
...there's a lot to unpack about it.
This video, which felt to me less like a typical viral music video and more like an interpretive dance piece, has been covered by other media sources extensively. I wanted to write something about it anyway though, because with my background in psychology, I had a very specific reaction to it, and I’d like to share it.
"This is America" is the kind of video you have to watch at least a few times. Fortunately, that's made easier on the viewer since it's catchy and full of jaunty, fun dance moves. These bits frequently redirect the viewer’s attention from the other parts of the video that feature horrifying Kubrickian violence depicting everything from biblical signs of the apocalypse to the Rodney King beatings. And that’s the point.
The brilliance of the video comes from the fact that Gambino and his backup dancers spend most of the video distracting the audience from what's going on behind them, occasionally shocking us with gun violence and abrupt tempo changes.
This can best be demonstrated by an experiment I first saw in a psychology class in high school...and then again in another psychology class in college.
Just watch the whole thing. Credits to Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris for creating the video.
When something has our attention, the human brain typically focuses on it to the exclusion of everything else, sometimes even things in the same field of vision. This is called selective attention, and Donald Glover makes deft use of it in "This is America."
Mainstream news and entertainment outlets on TV and social media keep us constantly distracted so that even if we pay attention to the state of the world long enough to get rightfully furious about how blatantly unfair things currently are, rest assured we'll forget all about it approximately twelve seconds later, the next time those same outlets push something equally outrageous, or at least something sufficiently attention-grabbing in our faces to distract us before we have time to turn that outrage into practical action to improve the world. Often, in America, this involves the appropriation of black culture. Thus, just as black people and other people of color are systematically abused and murdered by people who face no consequences for their actions, black culture is appropriated by the same corporate, largely white institutions to distract the general public from such atrocities.
It's amazing what you don't see when you're distracted. Even if it's right in front of you.