Music video analysis

In the music video for this is America when

childish Gambino moves away from the
dancers he keeps turning around to look at
the dancers as if he is worried that they are
going to do something bad to him when he is
not watching like pull out a gun. This says that
some people in America are paranoid about
shootings and it is a constant threat. This can
also be backed up by the line he says at this
time in the video. ‘‘Look how I'm living now ... i
got the strap ... i gotta carry ’em’’. this shows
that he has to carry a gun to survive day to
day life showing that street violence is a
constant threat for many Americans.
Again relating to gun violence, at the start of the music video Childish Gambino
shoots a man with a bag over head sitting in a chair and a man with a red cloth
takes the gun while the man who is shot is dragged away by two people. The man
with the red cloth who takes the gun symbolises that many American people care
more about gun ownership then the lives of human beings.
In this scene in the music video Childish Gambino is dancing to a choir singing until
he pulls out a AK and guns the choir down. This scene is a reference to the 2015
Charleston church shooting in which a white supremacist entered a historically
black church and shot and killed 9 people. This shooting happend only a few years
before the music video was made, showing that racist violence that still happens in
America. It also shows that shootings are very common in America and are just
normal now, even with attempts to put laws into place.
Childish Gambino makes more links to Americas racist history. In the video
he is wearing Confederate jeans and at the start when he shoots a man he
poses in a similar way to the Jim Crow racist stereotype character.