5/8/18

Today in class we started out by talking in our groups about how we thought John Oliver critiques segregation in today's schools.  We came up with how he uses comedy to take away the blame on the children,  to show all of the limited environments, to show the division of school systems, and to take the tone down a notch.  We then finished watching the John Oliver video that we did not complete yesterday.  Mr. Rivers gave us an opening image of Childish Gambino's music video to decode and we thought he looked crazy, looks unkempt, we see wealth, along with the implement of being held up/held down.  We then compared it to a racist character image where it has big lips, says chicken, the big eyes.  Noticing in these two images that Childish Gambino is sort of making a reference to this racist character as they are making the same facial expressions.  We then proceeded to watch his music video of his song this is America.  There were many symbols in this video about the truth of black people's lives today.  One of these were when he shoots the first man and drags him and cradles the gun in a cloth showing that the gun is more important than the human being.  He is showing that this is a decades old issue but brings in things like kids with Iphones to show it is a new issue too.  He then shoots a choir with a police car there and it shows that crime is ignored.  A major point is that chaos and violence is hidden by social media and distract people from the severity of it. The lyrics also show a point when he shoots the people he sings "this is America."  Another unnoticed symbol was the idea of "death" riding a horse being chased by cops and heading straight for the children.  And despite all the violence no cops are actually seen, only their cars. Overall it shows that every time there is celebration death follows showing that the American Dream can't be achieved by everyone because there is no equal chances.  With the time remaining in class we watched the video again to get the full effect and to make sure we didn't miss any of the chaos in the background.