Plinth

When I wrote that the music video merits a million critiques, it’s worth saying that it’s already prompted myriad written responses. Most that I’ve seen have approached the piece, which both screams for and elides analysis, with a run-down of the ‘hidden symbolism’ packed into it. Examples? Oh, you know, the horseman of the apocalypse riding through the background; SZA’s cameo as the Statue of Liberty; guns shot and promptly whisked away, wrapped in red cloth like holy books; the (at least) triple-meaning of ‘This a celly/ That’s a tool.’ I can’t grapple with everything Gambino does – but I hope that this line will serve as a jumping off-point. To see the whole, zoom in.

Those 6 words contain multitudes. Centuries of vicious oppression coalesce in a line delivered with something like flippancy: institutionalised systems of thought, legal loopholes and hangovers, the reflection of the not-so-distant past in the deeply felt ‘now’ and, perhaps, some recourse to technological progress to usher in the societal equivalent. So – celly as ‘cellphone’, ‘cell block’; tool as ‘utensil’, and as ‘gun’. The surface meaning of the line, then, is that mobile phones (more specifically, their cameras) are becoming instrumental in the fight for black people’s equality. This isn’t news in itself: most people with an internet connection will have seen one or more videos online, shot with an iPhone or similar, of a confrontation between a white police officer and black members of the public. The footage is frequently shocking, although I realise that’s a naïve comment from a white girl in the UK who will probably never have to worry about being thrown against a car by a sergeant – let alone fear being shot by one. Personal privilege aside (if that’s possible), it seems undeniable that these videos have stepped, front and centre, into an ongoing conversation about race in America and beyond. A camera in almost every pocket at any given moment might sound problematic, but it also forces a kind of objectivity into disputes about attitudes and actions which find their ancestors in (more explicit) systems of white supremacy, i.e., imbued with a poisonous and calculated subjectivity. These structures have long painted voices of black victims as those of criminals, propping up a system which birthed its own prejudice like a snake eating its tail. Now, the cannibalism is there to see in full HD – and for a world fixated by visual content, these videos are hard to look away from.

Diving deeper, ‘This a celly/ That’s a tool’ is two voices. The first, an unarmed black man – the second, the cop who (retrospectively, conveniently) mistakes his phone for a gun and shoots him. Stephon Clark, 22, was shot in his grandmother’s back garden by police who did not announce themselves as such or give him time to respond to their shouted demands that he reveal his hands before they emptied a round of bullets into his body. This happened on March 18th, 2018 – less than 2 months before This Is America was released on May 5th. Aside from engaging with a specific incident, with echoes in a hundred other harrowing stories, Gambino/Glover is setting up the eternal power of the ‘last-word.’ Here, as almost always, the dominant (white, police) voice speaks last. Whatever the truth might be is irrelevant, as long as it can be spoken over. Celly? Tool.

Gambino’s line, which expresses more in 6 words than anyone could in unpacking it, could read ‘celly’ as cellmate or cellblock, i.e., the US prison system. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explains how America’s programme of mass incarceration has come to be used as the government’s primary means of enforcing systems of oppression both old and new. For instance: the proportion of African American men with some sort of criminal record approaches 80% in some major US cities. African Americans make up 13.2% of America’s population, and yet black men account for more than 40% of all prison inmates. There were more black men under correctional control in the US in 2011 than were enslaved in 1850. With these staggering statistics in mind (and again, I acknowledge the luxury of being able to summon and dismiss the outrage, rather than living it) a cellblock is the US’s most powerful and dangerous ‘tool’ to be wielded against African Americans. When it became illegal to discriminate based on race, the system adapted to make race illegal. A monolith is invisible by virtue of its size; work like Glover’s makes the intangible touchable, if only for a moment.

‘This a celly/ That’s a tool.’ Throughout the video, Gambino’s dancing and dancers in the foreground distract us from the various police chases, suicides and even the horseman of the apocalypse behind them. Mobile phones, and the mainstream media they convey, keep us docile – so says Glover. What’s happening behind the sanctioned entertainment is what’s really worth looking at, but there’s an agenda ensuring that we don’t. After all, if we watched closely and engaged with the astounding brutality and injustice, we might start asking questions. Worse, we might demand change. As it is, the powers-that-be are confident in the mollifying potency of popular culture and its endless conveyor belt of new faces and quick fixes. The end is nigh, the world exploding – and the sparks that lit its fuse are too deep rooted and overwhelming for a populous whose attention span has been diminished to 280 characters to grapple with. It’s safe in the celly; now, lift your head from the screen, above the parapet, and point it at what’s there. Use the tool.

By Emily Watkins