Racial Crosscurrents in Popular Culture

When we talk about race, the locus of our discourse matters. Not just who is doing the analysis or consuming it, but also its genre and exigence; not just what is being said, but what its invisible warrants and aftereffects are. Late-stage capitalism—a political and economic system designed to subsume emergent popular culture, repackage it, and sell it for profit—makes identifying the locus of political protest that much murkier. We must always cynically ask: is this political resistance or commercialism at play? As consumers of pop cultural discourses about race, we often find ourselves face to face with this cynicism; Che Guevara would likely be horrified that we make capitalists rich when we wear his steely-eyed countenance on T-shirts, to name just one example. But there are pop cultural genres that penetrate the mainstream, become subsumed by capitalism, and manage to continue on as symbols of resistance to dominant paradigms and hierarchies. While the film industry has in large part been hijacked by interests whose quest for profit make its content safe and unchallenging, there are still financially successful films that interrogate race in interesting ways, like 2017’s Get Out. Hip hop, too, is commercial, but is nevertheless still almost synonymous with resistance, being taken up by minority cultures the world over as a way to speak back to empire. “This is America” by Donald Glover’s alter ego, “Childish Gambino,” is a contemporary example of resistance music that manages, through sleight of hand, to be both commercial and subversive; meanwhile, Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino, is a metonymy for a kind of racial crosscurrent that appears to challenge the status quo while actually reinforcing it.

In the video for his hip hop opus, Glover’s character sings, dances, smokes a joint, and shoots guns, integrating several musical genres including rap, blues, South African protest music, and gospel into a mash-up with several narrative and musical threads. The track vies with fast-changing images that sometimes correspond with the singing and sometimes compete with it to accomplish two things: on the one hand to launch a searing critique of the commodification of and violence toward black bodies and, on the other, to entertain. Many of its messages are encoded, making the balance of these, as in Get Out, defy America’s racial status quo by pretending to conform to it. The apparent conformity is what gives the song its universal appeal, but, like the pearl in the oyster shell, the critique contained therein is its true exigence, and what might make the song endure well past a musical “sell-by” date. The video, set in a subterranean garage, superimposes dancing African Americans, many of them schoolchildren in uniform, against a backdrop of police violence, gun-toting vigilantes, blown out cars, prison yards, and a horseman of the apocalypse. The dancers’ faces vacillate between vapid grins and contorted rictuses that evoke Jim Crow-era minstrel art. Childish Gambino, presiding over the chaos, is sometimes victim, sometimes performing buffoon, sometimes detached observer, and sometimes aggressor. He shoots a man in cold blood in the video’s opening vignette (a man who had been playing a South African protest song on acoustic guitar), and later guns down an all-black church choir, a brief but obvious reference to the Charleston church shooting. The quickness of the video’s cuts, the way order and chaos vie across the scene, and the way the video is broken into vignettes, makes the meaning continuously slip between race violence and race commodification. In “Why the Dancing Makes ‘This Is America’ So Uncomfortable to Watch,” The Atlantic’s Aida Amoako calls Glover’s mugging, “a denunciation of the distractions that keep many Americans from noticing how the world around them is falling apart.” This analysis, she goes on to say, is “complicated” by the video’s multiple references to racial trauma, so the contrasts between representation and lived experience is where the video’s focus lies. An attentive viewer sees all this, but the catchy tune and surreal imagery also entertain enough so that a music lover of any political persuasion can tap their toes.

Contrast also saves the video from coming off as preachy or becoming too easy to interpret. Most enduring art endures because it is interpretable, and critics have read various messages into the minutest details of the track. The garage is America. Glover is America. A “Celly” as he mentions in the lines “This a celly (ha) / That's a tool (yeah) / On my Kodak (woo, Black)” accompanies a pan of what looks like a prison cell-block (a politically resonant sense of “celly”); but the prisoners are schoolchildren with the cameras running on their cellphones (an equally relevant suggestion that the only way African Americans might get justice in the face of police violence is if they have a camera). And then there is the dancing itself. As The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix notes in “The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America,’” Glover manages to,

contort his body in a manner that induces memories of the grotesque theatre of jigging and cake-walking. Sometimes the movements and how they activate his muscles make him look sexy, at other times crazed. His manic elation erupts into violence at a speed that matches something of the media consumer’s daily experience.

Blink and you might miss it. Inherent in the song are the multiple personalities of the news and pop cultural cycles. Hip hop, with its collaborative sense (its creative framework fashions something new out of extant music samples and often includes dialogic elements), is particularly suited for this schizophrenia. All Americans live within our crazed news cycle, but the video suggests that the way African Americans inhabit it is unique to their experience and asks the dominant culture to live, for a few minutes, inside it. In “Close-Up: Hip Hop Cinema,” Regina N. Bradley comments on the way hip hop serves “as a mouthpiece for exploring the marginalized experiences of black and brown people in the United States and abroad” (141), for hip hop has spread throughout the world as symbolic of minority protest, and has proven remarkably robust in the face of commercial interests. In fact, its commercial appeal is in large part why its messages can be so widely disseminated, and why it tends to become a musical subgenre in parts of the world plagued by oppression. In “Arabic Hip Hop: Claims of Authenticity and Identity of a New Genre,” for instance, Usama Kahf notes hip hop’s power to mobilize marginalized groups:

Hip hop is a unique form of expression that has crossed social, cultural, and  national boundaries in the last couple of decades, from Europe and South America to Africa and the Middle East… While it was brought to life by the African-American community in the United States, hip hop's ruptures into different cultures around the world were not driven by any of the homogenizing… forces of western culture that usually seek to take over local and indigenous heritages… Instead, hip hop continues to locate its narrative space in the margins of each society (Kahf 359).

“This is America” deliberately leverages Glover’s fame and the burgeoning hip hop market (for as a genre it is by no means limited to African American consumers) to educate, illuminate, and enflame, and it does the deadly serious in a fun and pleasurable way. The song stands alone as a song, but combined with the video it becomes a tour de force. In “‘Reading’ Hip Hop Discourse in the Twenty-First Century,” Candace M. Jenkins notes that hip hop criticism is often logocentric, but that the genre’s power is its ability to create a connection between mind and body. The rapper implicates “his or her speaking body, but also quite possibly the body of the listener, which takes the artist’s voice in, often repeats it, and is (at least temporarily) transformed by that participatory performance” (Jenkins 4). Viewers live inside the frantic, violent, terrifying world of the video for a moment, singing along, feeling the pull to dance and join in, and that moment of empathy is where the song unifies commercialism and protest.

If “This is America” is a serious message packaged in a shiny wrapper, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is its fraternal inverse. It is a pill that slides down like a suppository while reassuring white people that they are OK and challenging nothing. In essence, Gran Torino is an exemplar of race exploration that reinforces the status quo while espousing to confront it. Unlike “This is America,” Eastwood’s ostensibly anti-racist film keeps tight (one could say “colonial”) control over its own racial narrative, effectively cauterizing any challenge to the white male privilege that is the beating heart at its center. Eastwood changes the focus from those who are oppressed to the ability of oppressors to “change their ways” without really changing. In fact, the Character Eastwood plays in the film, Walt Kowalski, has his racist utterances mildly critiqued, but the ultimate message appears to be “racist is as racist does,” denying that hate-speech is damaging to those at the other end of it. Only hate-acts, the film suggests, are truly hateful. Moreover, the film borrows the tired tropes of the “white savior” and the “model minority” as the basis of the story, undermining its anti-racist message. Kowalski, a Korean war veteran and retired Detroit autoworker, must overcome his racism toward Asians to help a Hmong family save their effeminate son from learning the “wrong” kind of masculinity from a Vietnamese street gang. Thao, the boy, attempts to steal Kowalski’s vintage Gran Torino, and the plot unfolds from there, privileging Eastwood’s rather myopic (and at this point outdated) view of masculinity, of which the car is emblematic. Kowalski manages, by film’s end, to assimilate the recalcitrant Thao into American culture by turning him into the same “dying breed” that he embodies. He leaves his car, at the final scene, to the boy, writing his even more effeminate children out of his will.

In “Gran Torino, white masculinity, and Racism,” Jessie Adia critiques some of the film’s warrants:

Setting the film in the context of the auto industry is not coincidental, and the fate of Kowalski’s character and his dying (or, at the very least, seriously troubled) industry are intertwined. Both appear to be on their way out, but the cherry perfect condition of the Gran Torino speaks of a past, muscular glory. Along with the car, Kowalski’s house stands out in the neighborhood, and his meticulous tending of his small, tidy lawn serves as a marker of his class (and moral) values.

The film assumes a rightness to Kowalski’s worldview and social mores—in fact, the film at times seems to critique political correctness more than racism. Meanwhile, the Hmong characters are bisected into two groups: the perversely masculine criminals, and the meek and vulnerable victims. “As such,” Adia comments, “the Hmong are represented in ways that are consistent with stereotypical images… passive, docile, and acquiescent, the ‘model minority,’ or dangerous criminals who constitute… a ‘yellow peril.’” In a similar vein, Louise Shein and Va-Megn Thoi, in “Gran Torino’s Boys and Men with Guns,” interrogate the film’s complicity with a national schizophrenia about the Hmong. At the same time, they became allies during the Vietnam war, and thus “synonymous with the anti-communist fight” but then, after a notorious case of Hmong violence in the United states, synonymous “with fighting in general” (Shein and Va-Megn). Thus the film’s view of its racial minority doesn’t take into account the plurality that always exists in any community, minority or not. Rather, it relies on preexisting Hmong stereotypes and layers general Asian stereotypes on top of them, for plurality “cannot make it into visibility under [an] American gaze so durably focused on the utility of Hmong to its war” (Shein and Va-Megn). While the film isn’t particularly regressive—Eastwood employed and consulted with Hmong-Americans for the film—neither is it truly advocating for tolerance and empathy of our cultural “others” in the way Childish Gambino is. It hardly asks us to reframe our thinking about race. It seems instead to ask why we condemn the racist. After all, he might decide to save the helpless minorities who are plagued not by racism but by other minorities. And directors like Eastwood might decide, in their beneficence, to represent a people who, the film suggests, cannot represent themselves. To many Hmong interviewed by Shein and Va-Megn, the film was an improvement over the invisibility and unidimensional cultural stereotyping that existed before it, but what if a Hmong had directed the film and located its heartbeat in the chest of a Hmong character? What if Eastwood had taken himself out of the film, leaving only Hmong characters? Both would be less commercially successful, I’d guess, but would have more to say about race.

 “This is America” reframes the disparate, contradictory national narratives of the black experience, wresting representation away from the dominant culture. The video literally employs the imperative: “Dance and shake the frame.” Gran Torino tries to pull our frame of reference back to a more conservative past, asking us to reframe the way we see aging racists. Since provenance is important when we examine the space where art that represents the dominant narratives meet the counternarratives generated from the margins, I can only imagine that a film made by a Hmong film director might look a little bit like Glover’s video—it might challenge and complicate rather than reassure. It would be a better film. I do not mean to suggest that strong messaging about race must emanate from minorities—it is possible to tell a challenging racial story about a group not one’s own—but it must also respect difference, and be willing to acknowledge privilege. The white person might need to step aside now and then and acknowledge his or her complicity in the racial trauma of others. Traditionally, art that supports commonly-held beliefs about race in dominant culture gets wider distribution and scrutiny since it comforts those in power and reinforces the “rightness” of that power. But conversely, pop cultural genres that get traction in the dominant culture, such as hip hop, can be leveraged to “reverse” the subject of scrutiny to the dominant culture, interrogating white attitudes toward and narratives about race in American culture. I can only imagine what would happen if Glover and his Japanese director Hiro Murai would have come up with if they took on the film Gran Torino (or indeed how Eastwood might have written and staged the video for “This is America”). For any work of art endeavoring to take on race in our fractious nation, we might ask ourselves three questions: does the work of art move us toward greater empathy and understanding, or does it in some way serve to oppress and justify oppression? Does this artwork reveal anything about minority identities or does it focus on and assume the normativity of a white protagonist who isn’t asked to change? And does it ask us to reframe our national narratives or reassert them? As a nation we need to get better at looking beyond comfort and commercialism to the art that challenges as much as it entertains.

Works Cited

Adia, Jessie. “‘Gran Torino,’ White Masculinity, and Racism.” Racism Review: Scholarship and Activism Toward Racial Justice, 17 Jan, 2009.

Amoako, Aida. “Why the Dancing Makes 'This Is America' So Uncomfortable to Watch.” The Atlantic Online, 8 May 2018.

Bradley, Regina N. “hip hop Cinema as a Lens of Contemporary Black Realities.” Black Camera, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 141-5.

Eastwood, Clint. Gran Torino. Warner Brothers Pictures, 2008.

Glover, Donald. “This Is America by Childish Gambino.” Directed by Hiro Murai, Sony Music Entertainment for YouTube, 5 May 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddJqNY__9U8

Jenkins, Candace M. “‘Reading’ hip hop Discourse in the Twenty-First Century.” African American Review, Vol. 46, Vol. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 1-8.

Kahf, Usama. “Arabichip hop: Claims of Authenticity and Identity of a New Genre.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2007, pp. 359-385.

Maus, Derek C. and James J. Donahue. “Post-Soul Sartre: Black Identity after Civil Rights.” African American Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2015, pp. 220-222.

Schein, Louisa and Va-Megn Thoi. “Gran Torino’s Boys and Men with Guns: Hmong Perspectives.” Hmong Studies Online, Vol. 1, 1 Jan 2009.

St. Félix, Doreen. “The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America.’” The New Yorker Online, 7 May 2018.