A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Childish Gambino’s Music Video “This is America”

Abstract

The portrayal of African Americans in the United States has been approached throughout the years in different fields. Childish Gambino's song and music video "This is America" offers an interesting view regarding gun control in the United States, African American stereotypes and their representation in mass media. In order to propose an interpretation of Gambino's lyrics and video, I provide a multimodal discourse analysis using the visual semiotic framework (Machin, 2010) and the systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1978). The findings highlight the manipulated discourse that is present in the media regarding not only African Americans but other minority groups. This "new racism" (Littlefield, 2008) has an impact on the audience, which in turn perpetuates the negative ideas and stereotypes of the African American community.