# data[].attributes.body
Graphic Organizers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
theatlantic.com-Why the Dancing Makes This Is America So Uncomfortable to Watch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
cnn.com-Childish Gambinos poignant This Is America lyrics

# data[].attributes.body
The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The new music video from Childish Gambino weaponizes the viewer's instinctive bodily empathy.

RCA

Decades later, inspired by '90s research on so-called mirror neurons-cells discovered in the brains of monkeys that react equally when the body performs an action as when it sees the action performed-modern dance theorists such as Ivar Hagendoorn and Susan Leigh Foster applied the idea to humans. Kinesthetic empathy, critics like Foster have argued, is what makes dance feel so infectious-and what prompts the body, upon seeing another body dance, to internally simulate the movement.

Related Story

Donald Glover Is Watching You Watch Him
If you watch "This Is America" on YouTube, you might stumble on videos of people who recorded their own reactions to it. Many of these viewers sway along with Glover at first, rolling their own shoulders, nodding to the afro folk-inspired melody as the musician twists his bare torso, revealing his own musculature and contorting his body in ways both alluring and disturbing. But the benign nature of that contagion is shattered when the first gunshot rings out 53 seconds in, and with the jarring transition of the melody to dark, pulsing trap. In the reaction videos, mouths fall open, and people are stunned into paralysis. The shooting itself is shocking, but so is that fact that Glover carries on dancing as if nothing happened.

An internal struggle begins in the viewer's body, which is pulled between joy and horror. Just as the video questions how we can dance when there is pandemonium all around, the audience struggles with whether to continue moving, too, after witnessing such brutality, especially after Glover shoots an entire choir of gospel singers, supposedly in reference to the 2015 murder of nine churchgoers by Dylann Roof in Charleston, South Carolina.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why the Dancing Makes 'This Is America' So Uncomfortable to Watch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The new music video from Childish Gambino weaponizes the viewer's instinctive bodily empathy. Decades later, inspired by '90s research on so-called mirror neurons-cells discovered in the brains of monkeys that react equally when the body performs an action as when it sees the action performed-modern dance theorists such as Ivar Hagendoorn and Susan Leigh Foster applied the idea to humans.

# data[].attributes.body
NPR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What a weekend it was for Donald Glover. The 34-year-old rapper, actor and producer hosted Saturday Night Live, appearing as both as the host and the musical guest. He performed two new songs under his stage name, Childish Gambino. But it was the performance and subsequent video release of his new song, "This Is America," that has had everyone talking since its late-night release.

The song's visual starts with this striking juxtaposition. Over South African-sung melodies, a black man in a chair is playing a guitar in an empty warehouse while a shirtless Glover sings with his back to the camera. Glover alternates between tribal dances and viral dances while flashing an exaggerated minstrel-like smile. The first shock in the video - one of many - comes when Glover takes a pistol and shoots the man playing guitar in the back of the head.

"The South African melodies suddenly give way to this really dark Southern American trap music," NPR Music hip-hop journalist Rodney Carmichael says. "The rest of the video is this barrage of symbolism and chaos."

There are Jim Crow imagery, dancing schoolchildren toting firearms and a black gospel choir. Glover opens fire on the choir, a seeming reference to the Charleston church mass shooting of 2015.

"I think in a lot of ways what Glover is trying to do is really bring our focus and our attention to black violence, black entertainment [and] the way they're juxtaposed in society. They seem to cancel each other out in the greater public consciousness," Carmichael explains.

The closing scene of the four-minute video shows the artist running from a mob of people with an expression of horror on his face.

"It feels to me like it's a black man running from a lynch mob," Carmichael says. Some have also taken the scene to depict him trying to escape "The Sunken Place," a reference to Jordan Peele's 2017 racial horror film, Get Out."Either way, it is representative of this history of violent white supremacy."

Glover is enjoying a mainstream moment right now. His FX show, Atlanta, which Glover executive-produces, writes and stars in, has earned Golden Globe awards. He won his first Grammy Award earlier this year for his 2016 song "Redbone." He is starring in Solo: A Star Wars Story this spring. As Carmichael argues, Glover is using his moment to bring attention to the perils of his people, especially following Kanye West's controversial statements on slavery and public alignment with President Trump.

"We're really kind of grappling with what our entertainers at that level do with the spotlight they have on them; what kind of message are they projecting out into the world," Carmichael says. "I think with Glover, he wants to be putting out the concerns of black folk, of folks who are voiceless in this world. And I think he wants to present it in a way where it's as challenging to his audience as it is to those outside on a mass scale."
Web editor Sidney Madden contributed to this story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Donald Glover's 'This Is America' Holds Ugly Truths To Be Self-Evident

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What a weekend it was for Donald Glover. The 34-year-old rapper, actor and producer hosted Saturday Night Live , appearing as both as the host and the musical guest. He performed two new songs under his stage name, Childish Gambino.

# data[].attributes.body
Rolling Stone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Donald Glover may be done making things for you to enjoy. His newest single as Childish Gambino, "This is America," joins the second season of his FX series, Atlanta ("Robbin' Season"), in showcasing a darker, more sinister vision than anything he's done before. Both works take his audience on a macabre journey through a nation where entertainment is more important than justice. People are dying in "This is America," but all they want us to do is sing and dance. It's an upsettingly vivid illustration of the Faustian bargain that black America makes on a regular basis, trading our bodies for our expression and freedom.

Directed by Glover's longtime collaborator Hiro Murai, the video for "This is America" opens with an act of horror: Glover shoots a hooded, handcuffed black guitarist execution-style, and a couple of schoolchildren rush in to drag his body offscreen. More children join Glover to dance around the massive warehouse where the video takes place as more and more chaos unfolds The setting evokes Michael Jackson's 30-year-old landmark "Bad" video, which made use of a similarly abandoned city space to grapple with internal conflicts about a black artist's placement in society. In "This is America," cars are set ablaze, a man drops to his apparent death from a balcony, and Glover mercilessly guns down a joyful church choir. The children dance unfazed all the while, each time bearing a different type of witness to what's happening. A child is the one to handle Glover's weapon after each shooting, and it's children who sit in the rafters above, recording the bedlam with their phones. Our normalization of racist violence has come at the cost of not only black lives, but black innocence.

Like several other notable works of black American art in recent years, "This is America" is about absorption. Onscreen and in real life, the black body gets exposed to so much terror and injustice and keeps going. How does the black body endure, and in what ways or spaces is it allowed to live out its emotions? Beyoncé's Lemonade used the body as a diary of past pains and potentially redemptive experiences. Get Out showed us the price of a body that is literally inhabited by the constant white gaze. Lena Waithe's The Chi on Showtime has reminded us of how often black people - particularly children - are asked to absorb the dangers of America and still required to be happy. Black Panther is about a hero who has the ability to absorb the violent energy thrown at him and reflect it back.

But this is America, and while there are no superheroes here, Glover's video calls back to the long history of black folks coming up with ways to barter our physical existence for a slice of the pie. It's meant trafficking in our pain to get paid even a little, a dynamic steeped into our conjoined history with America. Throughout the video, he acts out a familiar tightrope walk for many hip-hop artists who have found success through revisiting painful experiences. "Get your money, black man" is sage advice that has been passed on through generations. Glover keeps dancing as he talks about the relationship between materialism, blackness, consumption and exploitation.

"This is America" reflects the desire to use every one of our available platforms to punch at America's conscience. So we keep recycling our trauma into art, which mainstream America then consumes and judges on the same scale as black entertainers' less burdened white peers. That tension has been at the heart of countless pop-culture flashpoints: Kendrick Lamar losing the 2014 Best Rap Album Grammy to Macklemore; Lemonade losing 2017's Album of the Year Grammy to Adele's 25; the dramatic Oscars finish between Moonlight and La La Land in 2017.It bears repeating that blackness rarely gets the liberty of being free from its circumstances, while the rest of America gets to sit back and be entertained by us. Glover forces us to look at exactly who we are as a result.

With Get Out 's Sunken Place, Jordan Peele gave a name to the desperate, gasping, hellish depths that surround Black America - a place that so many of us are trying to escape while others seem to dive and wallow in it. There's an echo of this image in "This is America," which closes with Glover running frantically in the dark with indistinct people in close pursuit. After a breathtaking four minutes of violence, somehow this moment is the most terrifying of all. Why are they trying to capture him: for causing so much destruction, or for revealing the truth about our country? As the mob closes in on him, the thought occurs that his captors plan to return Glover to his scripted role in a culture where the black entertainer isn't a mirror, but a toy. This is America. Shut up and dance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Donald Glover's 'This is America' Is a Nightmare We Can't Look Away From

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Donald Glover may be done making things for you to enjoy. His newest single as Childish Gambino, "This is America," joins the second season of his FX series, Atlanta ("Robbin' Season"), in showcasing a darker, more sinister vision than anything he's done before.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Childish Gambino - This Is America (Live At SNL)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Childish Gambino - This Is America (Official Video)

# data[].attributes.body
Time Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
childish gambino american royalty lyrics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Here Are the Lyrics to Childish Gambino's "This Is America"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here are the words to "This Is America," Donald Glover's brand-new song as Childish Gambino.

# data[].attributes.body
Time Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Expert's Take on the Symbolism in Childish Gambino's Viral 'This Is America' Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Childish Gambino's video for "This Is America" has everyone talking. Here's what a music historian says about its meaning.