shared air

raceandreadallover:

is the new flo + the machine video fraught with racism? well…i dont think so but interesting analysis from notyouraveragenanswriting:

I could get into the video’s misrepresentation of voodoo or its perpetuation of representing evil as black and good as white (despite some of the lyrics’ disagreement there: “I never knew daylight could be so violent”). There are many, many issues with the video. So many, in fact, that it can (and has) easily be classified as flat-out racist. But as I don’t have a lot of time to write lengthy analyses at the moment, I’d just like to point you to another clip which immediately popped into my head while I was watching this video. In this particular clip, there is also a man in black paint, a woman on the run from him, and a fall from great height. The clip is a scene from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist masterpiece about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation….

Did this intertextuality happen on purpose? Was the video’s art director (subconsciously) inspired by the scene from Birth of a Nation? I don’t know the answer to these questions. But it seems to be abundantly clear that the video of “No Light, No Light” uncritically references and, thus, perpetuates insidious, racist cultural narratives, no matter what its original intentions may have been. And we should call it out for that reason alone. Do I still love the music? Sure. Am I still excited about the concert? Most definitely. But I think one’s love for something should never allow us to stop looking at it critically.

last line- def. agreed.