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brutality. It instead lays bare the realities of our time and their roots in systems that depend on the criminalization and disenfranchisement of black people. It’s not too difficult to think of “This Is America” as a parallel of sorts to Kayla’s song. Like Ward’s transhistorical ghosts, Gambino’s minstrel poses, the video’s images of police brutality, and its tableaus of riot and chaos cumulatively demonstrate how the past is an actor demanding recognition in the present. Knowing this makes one, rightly, hopeless, and the works I have been discussing don’t shy away from this hopelessness. But it doesn’t only make one hopeless, insofar as it also provides varied contexts for recognizing how white supremacy and systemic racism continue to organize American life. The new black Gothic aesthetic thus functions in popular black art as a tool for representing black life on its own terrorized terms.
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