“This is America”: repurposing the white gaze through imitation

Abstract

ABSTRACTChildish Gambino's music video “This is America” garnered national attention for its graphic portrayals of commodified Black pain. The music video critically exposes how white America visually consumes Black pain for entertainment and profit via the sadistic fetishism of the white gaze. Through the rhetorical strategy of imitation, the video destabilizes and challenges the white gaze's fetishization of Black im/mobility and sadistic erasure of Black death, both of which are painful and violent depictions that have benefitted white America historically and culturally. My analysis offers what I theorize as repurposing the white gaze to understand how texts can visually subvert their own consumption, altering how viewers engage with mediated texts to challenge the consumer logics of the white gaze present in Black cultural productions. By repurposing the white gaze through imitation, “This is America” invites viewers to unsettle their own white gaze and engage the video's depictions anew, shifting viewers' orientation to see the invisible and hegemonic practices of the white gaze. The article concludes that scholars might find additional strategies that can repurpose the white gaze to advance creative ways to disrupt the suffocating white gaze.KEYWORDS: Whitenessimitationwhite gazeconsumptionBlack pain AcknowledgmentsThe author would like to thank Roger Stahl for his generous guidance and under whose direction this essay was theoretically developed through many stages as a dissertation chapter, as well as Belinda Stillion Southard, whose careful readings and suggestions were instrumental in the development of this essay. Thanks are also given to Savannah Greer Downing, Blake Cravey, and Alex Morales for their invaluable feedback for countless iterations of this essay and constant encouragement. Last, the author would like to thank Stacey K. Sowards and two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and constructive readings of this essay.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 When I write “white America,” I refer to the specific context of the US. This usage is not to reify the erasure of non-US nations in the Americas but to reflect the text’s name, “This is America,” which invokes US-specific events.2 This essay draws from Richard Dyer's understanding of “strange” in “The Matter of Whiteness.” Dyer charges that whiteness must be identified as abnormal or rather “strange” to challenge whiteness as a universal norm. Scholars can then expose the particularity of whiteness making it accountable for its violence. See Richard Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness,” in White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg (New York: Worth Publishers, 2005), 9–14.3 Lia McGarrigle, “How Twitter is Reacting to Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America’ Video,” HighSnobiety, May 7, 2018.4 McGarrigle, “How Twitter is Reacting.”5 Judy Berman, “‘This is America’: 8 Things to Read about Childish Gambino’s New Music Video,” The New York Times, May 8, 2018.6 McGarrigle, “How Twitter is Reacting.”7 Doreen St. Félix, “The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America,’” The New Yorker, May 8, 2018, 3.8 McGarrigle, “How Twitter is Reacting.”9 Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, “Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America,’” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2020): 139–51.10 LeMesurier, “Winking at Excess,” 140.11 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–44.12 Belinda Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993); Kirt Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 2 (2003): 89–108, 104–5; Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28 (1984): 125–33; Zora Neale Hurston, “The Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 1041–52.13 LeMesurier, “Winking at Excess,” 140.14 Raka Shome, “Outing Whiteness,” Review and Criticism 17, no. 3 (2000): 366–71.15 Shome, “Outing Whiteness,” 368.16 George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White Problem in American Studies,’” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995): 369–87; Shome, “Outing Whiteness”; Raka Shome, “Race and Popular Cinema: The Rhetorical Strategies of Whiteness in City of Joy,” Communication Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1996): 502–18; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291–310; Krista Ratcliffe, “Eavesdropping as Rhetorical Tactic: History, Whiteness, and Rhetoric,” JAC 20, no. 1 (2000): 87–119; Amanda Kay LeBlanc, “There’s Nothing I Hate More Than a Racist: (Re)centering Whiteness in American Horror Story: Coven,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 3 (2018): 273–85.17 Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 296.18 Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 44–65, 44.19 Dyer, “White”; Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness”; Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness.”20 LeBlanc, “There’s Nothing I Hate More Than a Racist,” 278.21 Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”; Shome, “Outing Whiteness”; Shome, “Race and Popular Cinema”; Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness”; Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness.”22 Shome, “Outing Whiteness.”23 Bryan J. McCann, The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017).24 Keven James Rudrow, “‘I See Death Around the Corner’: Black Manhood and Vulnerability in Me Against the World,” Journal of Black Studies 50, no. 7 (2019): 632–50; Robin Means Coleman and Jasmine Cobb, “No Way of Seeing: Mainstreaming and Selling the Gaze of Homo-Thug Hip-Hop,” Popular Communication 5, no. 2 (2007): 89–108.25 McCann, The Mark of Criminality; Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” The Humanities as Social Technology 53 (1990): 93-109, 94; Crystal Belle, “From Jay-Z to Dead Prez: Examining Representations of Black Masculinity in Mainstream versus Underground Hip-Hop Music,” Journal of Black Studies 45, no. 4 (2014): 287–300; Rudrow, “‘I See Death Around the Corner’”; Coleman and Cobb, “No Way of Seeing”; Murali Balaji, “Owning Black Masculinity: The Intersection of Cultural Commodification and Self-Construction in Rap Music Videos,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 2 (2002): 21–38.26 Balaji, “Owning Black Masculinity.”27 Herman Gray, “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,” Callaloo 18, no. 2 (1995): 401-5, 401.28 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); Balaji, “Owning Black Masculinity”; Miles White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).29 Eric King Watts, “An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption,” Communication Studies 48, no. 1 (1997): 42–58.30 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).31 Stuart Hall, “What is This ‘Black’ in Black popular Culture?,” Social Justice 20, no. 1/2 (1993): 104–14, 108.32 West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” 94.33 hooks, Black Looks.34 hooks, Black Looks, 34.35 hooks, Black Looks; Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes. Alongside Yancy and hooks, other Black scholars and authors like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Eric King Watts, and Rachel Griffin emphasize how the white gaze influences our viewing and understanding of Blackness. Such scholars repeatedly illustrate how popular culture texts reinscribe the white gaze, blunting their resistive potential.36 Armond R. Towns, On Black Media Philosophy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 22.37 Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, xxxii.38 hooks, Black Looks; Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes; Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure.”39 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 132–3.40 Regina Austin, “Kwanzaa and the Commodification of Black Culture,” Black Renaissance 6, no. 1 (2004): 8–18, 9.41 Austin, “Kwanzaa,” 9.42 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiii–xiv; Southard, Militant Citizenship; Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”; Wilson, “The Racial Politics”, 104–5; Hurston, “The Characteristic of Negro Expression.”43 Southard, Militant Citizenship, 18.44 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiii–xiv.45 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiii–xiv; Southard, Militant Citizenship; Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.”46 M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984).47 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Dorothy J. Hale, “Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory,” ELH 61, no. 2 (1994): 445–71.48 Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 108. Quoted in Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 55–6.49 Gates, The Signifying Monkey, xxxiii.50 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.”51 Wilson, “The Racial Politics”, 104–5; Hurston, “The Characteristic of Negro Expression”; Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”; Shome, “Outing Whiteness.”52 Wilson, “The Racial Politics.”53 Wilson, “The Racial Politics,” 89.54 Karma Chávez defines textual stare as one that “gazes at the people I imagine as auditors: rhetors and rhetoricians who live in validated and invisibilized bodies” (p. 246). I use textual stare in a similar manner showing how the video performs this gaze at white America as they engage with the video itself. See Karma R. Chávez, “The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 242–50.55 Lisa Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (2020): 247–63; Shayla C. Nunnally, “(Re)Defining the Black Body in the Era of Black Lives Matter: The Politics of Blackness, Old and New,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6, no. 1 (2018): 138–52; Ronald L. Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006).56 Flores, “Stoppage,” 248.57 Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.58 Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About.59 Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About; Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (Princeton: Princeton Book Company, 1988).60 Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About.61 LeMesurier, “Winking at Excess,” 140; Rudrow, “‘I See Death Around the Corner.’”62 LeMesurier, “Winking at Excess.”63 Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About; Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow; Ronald L.F. Davis, “Creating Jim Crow: In-Depth Essay,” 2003.64 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 2.65 Eric Skelton, “The Story Behind Childish Gambino’s Symbolic ‘This is America’ Dance Choreography,” Complex, May 8, 2018.66 Davis, “Creating Jim Crow”; Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About, 169.67 Flores, “Stoppage.”68 Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012), 8.69 Nunnally, “(Re)Defining the Black Body,” 141.70 Nunnally, “(Re)Defining the Black Body,” 141.71 McCann, The Mark of Criminality.72 Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, 11.73 Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, 80.74 Rudrow, “‘I See Death Around the Corner’”; McCann, The Mark of Criminality; Balaji, “Owning Black Masculinity.”75 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “Erase,” 2023.76 I italicize literal Black death to emphasize that I read scenes that depict actual Black death. Notable Black scholars like Frank B. Wilderson III proclaim the Afropessimist notion that being marked Black is an ontological death, meaning a social death. I agree with this sentiment to an extent, especially given the logics of the white gaze, but I do not engage with this idea in this essay and thus mark my distinction of Black death. See Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2020).77 Jacob Shamsian, “24 Things You May Have Missed in Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America’ Music Video,” Insider, May 9, 2018.78 Jason Horowitz, Nick Corasaniti, and Ashley Southhall, “Nine Killed in Shooting at Black Church at Charleston,” The New York Times, June 17, 2015; Matt Ford and Adam Chandler, “‘Hate Crime’: A Mass Killing at a Historic Church,” The Atlantic, June 19, 2015; Tessa Berenson, “Everything We Know about the Charleston Shooting,” Time, June 18, 2015.79 McCann, The Mark of Criminality.80 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).81 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 76.82 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle.83 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 105; 103.84 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 86.85 Ersula Ore, On Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (University Press of Mississippi, 2019); Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 443–58.86 Bernard D. Headley, “‘Black on Black’ Crime: The Myth and the Reality,” Crime and Social Justice 20 (1983): 50–62; Camille Caldera, “Fact Check: Rate of White-on-White and Black-on-Black Crime are Similar,” USA TODAY, September 29, 2020.87 Headley, “‘Black on Black’ Crime.”88 Headley, “‘Black on Black’ Crime”; Shirley Carswell, “What the ‘Black-on-Black Crime’ Fallacy Misses about Race and Gun Deaths,” The Washington Post, July 8, 2020.89 McGarrigle, “How Twitter is Reacting.”90 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010); Earl Smith and Angela J. Hattery, “African American Men and the Prison Industrial Complex,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 34, no. 4 (2010): 387–98; “Economics of Incarceration: The Economic Drivers and Consequences of Mass Incarceration,” Prison Policy Initiative, September 5, 2023.91 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.92 hooks, Black Looks, 36.93 hooks, Black Looks; Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes; Watts, “Border Patrolling”; Ersula J. Ore, “Conspiring Against White Pleasures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 250–3; Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation”; Gabriel O. Apata, “‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Suffocating Nature of Racism,” Theory, Culture, & Society 37, no. 7–8 (2020): 241–54; Matthew Houdek and Ersula J. Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds and Breathable Futures,” Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 85–95; Matthew Houdek, “In the Aftertimes, Breathe: Rhetorical Technologies of Suffocation and an Abolitionist Praxis of (Breathing in) Relation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, no. 1 (2022): 48–74.94 Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation”; Houdek and Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds.”95 Tamika L. Carey, Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood (SUNY Press, 2016), 7.96 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 13.97 Wilson, “The Racial Politics”; Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiii–xiv; Southard, Militant Citizenship; Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.”98 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford University Press, 2007), 44.