Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that critical rhetorical work on race needs to account for how racist ideas are maintained and enacted via expectations about which kinesiologies are appropriate for which bodies. In the music video “This Is America,” artist Childish Gambino performs the contradictory expectations for Black male embodiment as both hyper-violent and hyper-talented by juxtaposing African and African American dance forms with gun violence. Analysis of this juxtaposition demonstrates how the expectation that the Black body must always remain in motion while in the public sphere creates an atmosphere of ontological exhaustion. These understandings of “appropriate” kinesiologies might be less prominent in discourse but no less influential on understandings of race. As the rhetorical analyst’s own body does not exist outside these societal biases, critical rhetorical analyses that seek to address racial divides should explicitly account for kinesthetic assumptions embedded in performance and viewership.

KEYWORDS:

• Dance
• embodiment
• movement
• race

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jacqueline Rhodes and the two anonymous reviewers for their rich feedback, as well as Will Penman, Ben Spatz, Anjali Vats, and Sharon Yam for their generous sharing of time and intellectual energy.

Notes

¹ The number of views was well over 600 million at the final drafting of this essay.

² Notably, this moment is a direct refusal of movement within a context that demands spectacular bodily performances. It is also difficult to move from a kneeling position.

³ Prominent female African American entertainers have taken a different direction in their portrayals of Black embodiment. For example, Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe both draw on Afrofuturist tropes in their social critiques (Edwards et al; English and Kim).

⁴ Daphne Brooks details how these hierarchies are deeply entangled with questions of citizenship and national identity in her reading of the play The Octoroon.

⁵ This expectation for “timeliness” also impacts African American female entertainers. Dayna Chatman discusses how Beyoncé was lauded for returning to work so quickly after giving birth in “Pregnancy, Then It’s ‘Back To Business.’”

⁶ On 4 September 2014, Kamilah Brock, an African American banker, was pulled over in Harlem. The police officer’s cited reason for pulling her over and impounding her car was a suspicion that she was high on marijuana, and one of the reasons cited for this suspicion was that she was dancing to music while stopped at a red light (N. Johnson).