Missing the Point at Full Volume

Donald Glover’s This is America works because it holds several things at once—spectacle and horror, choreographed joy and sudden brutality, the audience’s own complicity reflected back at them. Every frame earns its place. It’s the kind of work that punishes half-attention and rewards anyone willing to sit with its discomfort.

Which is what makes Nicole Arbour’s parody so dispiriting. A white woman appropriating the work of a Black artist who built it around the specific violence directed at Black people—and then using that frame as decoration for a broadly feminist message that has nothing to do with that critique—isn’t commentary. It’s noise wearing someone else’s clothes.

Glover’s video earns its weight through precision. Arbour’s has one register: look at me. The symbolism is blunt, the observations are thin, and the whole thing has the political depth of a bumper sticker printed on someone else’s art. Feminism matters. That’s not the argument. The argument is that not every cultural object is yours to occupy for your own agenda, and that some fights belong to people other than you, and that knowing the difference is the minimum requirement for taking any of it seriously.

I want my four minutes back. And while she’s at it, an apology would be appropriate—not to me, but to the women she made it harder for by associating this kind of ego with their cause.