How Donald Glover's "This is America" video utilizes sensory psychology to make a profound statement

"This is America" is a music video released last Saturday by Donald Glover, AKA Childish Gambino.

...there's a lot to unpack about it.

Other sources have covered to death this video, which felt to me less like a typical viral music video and more like an interpretive dance piece. With my background in psychology, I had a very specific reaction to it.

It's the kind of video you have to watch at least a few times. Fortunately, that's made easy on the viewer since it's just as catchy and full of jaunty, fun dance moves as it is horrifying Kubrickian scenes representing everything from biblical signs of the apocalypse to the Rodney King beatings.

The brilliance of the video comes from the fact that Gambino and his backup dancers spend most of the video distracting the audience from what's going on behind them, occasionally shocking us with gun violence and abrupt tempo changes.

This can best be demonstrated by an experiment I first saw in a psychology class in high school...and then again in another psychology class in college.

Just watch the whole thing. Credits to Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris for creating the video.

When we're trying to figure something out, or something engrossing has our attention, the human brain focuses on it to the exclusion of everything else, even things in the same field of vision. This is called selective attention, and Donald Glover makes deft use of it in "This is America."

Not unlike how reality TV and network news outlets keep us constantly distracted, so that even if we pay attention to the state of the world long enough to get rightfully furious, rest assured we'll forget all about it twelve seconds later next time Trump does something Trump-like, or Kanye releases a new video...thus, just as black people are systematically abused and murdered by people who face no consequences, black culture is appropriated by the same largely corporate, largely white institutions  to distract the general public from such atrocities.

It's amazing what you don't see when you're distracted. Even if it's right in front of you.