Childish Gambino- This is America

This music video by Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) has a central message about guns and violence within America and the idea that we deal with them as a part of entertainment and as if they aren't a major problem. This video has conventions of a performance video but mainly portrays the conventions of a narrative video.

During the first scene in the video we are introduced to a black male playing a guitar through the camera slowly tracking forward revealing the singer behind him. The tone and feel of the video is happy and joyful but quickly it switches to shock and surprise as Donald pulls out a gun and shoots the male, whos face is now covered. This clip is symbolizing a symbolic code from Barthe's Codes because it is raising awareness of masked identity murders of innocent black men within America. Right after he gets shots, Donald swiftly hands the gun to a young boy. This is implying the idea that America prioritizes guns over the lives of Black people and there are more people fighting for their guns to be allowed rather than people fighting for these innocent people. We can see that the gun is taken away with a red cloth, which is referenced again later on in the video, suggesting it was took with care, whilst the unknown black man is being harshly dragged away with no sympathy. This representation displays Levi-Strauss' binary oppositions with the idea of a weapon being respected versus a dead body being discarded like rubbish.

Further into the video, Donald is seen shooting a choir of church singers and he casually walks away past an empty police car. We follow him with a tracking shot in this scene which suggests the fact that these issues are so quickly moved on from and nothing gets done. The empty police car behind him is an enigma code as the audience questions why it is there. This could be a representation of how no police are present after the mass shooting that just occurred. There is the illusion that they are there, but they are not there implying the Black community doesn't receive enough help from the law enforcement.