When Childish Gambino gave the world "This Is America," he had a specific goal in mind. The chaos in the music video carries layers of symbolism, in both subtle and suggestive manners. The video has been hailed as a masterpiece, and relevant issues such as gun violence, racism, the ghost of Jim Crow, police brutality, and religion are all addressed within just a few minutes. Gambino focuses on Black culture in the video, but one Youtuber decided to put a twist on the video, crowing it the "women's edit."
The video has since gained the name "white women's edit." Creator Nicole Arbour is facing a mountain of backlash for her parody video that takes the subtle and genius aspects of "This Is America" and corrupts them with in your face satire this is hilarious in the worst way. Unlike Gambino's video, which starts with a man playing guitar getting shot in the head, Arbour's video features a woman breastfeeding in public that gets pulled away. After receiving endless backlash online, Arbour turned off the comment section for the video on Youtube.
Prior to the video's release, Arbour (a Kanye West fan) took to Twitter to opine about the controversial "slavery was a choice" conversation that lit the internet on fire two weeks ago. "'I'm so sick of people mad at slavery. It's the past, we weren't there. We didn't do it. But what we CAN do is fix economic slavery. Focus on the now," she wrote. Arbour deleted the tweet just as her video became controversial on the internet, but one keen user spotted the missing tweet before it was removed. After being called out on the deleted tweet, Arbour defended her stance, stating, "Oh I mean this. It's misdirected energy. I can't fix the past, but issues now, we all have a chance at so let's refocus. I wanna see more movies with black women CEOs and normalizing excellence for the next generation to see, less black ppl in prison, and police retraining."
Since then, Arbour has defended her video against a wave of critics. She believes her remake address important issues that females face, but feminists disagree and labeled the video as a poorly created parody. Some are even calling Arbour out for racial appropriation. "This is America / don't get you climbing up. This is America / got rape in my area / you got a drink / the roofies got into ya," raps the Youtuber. Arbour posted a lengthy explanation (not an apology) for the video, in which she claims that, "The purpose of my rendition was to honour the spirit of the video which absolutely moved me, by adding my and many women’s life experiences and truths to the brave and brutal truths expressed in the original." She continued on to state, "I firmly believe the best thing that can happen in America and North America right now is for everyone to create their own version of this video and show what life is like from their side."
Check out the video below and let us know what you think about Arbour's parody.