I hear you. I've never owned a slave either. But I've thoughtlessly told Black people what to do when I had no place to do so. And I’ve never lynched anyone, but I’ve unconsciously made "jokes" about Black people's suffering. Not out of malice but simply because that's what I saw growing up, and so took as "normal."

Glover's video “This is America” is meant to show the ugliness and wrongness of this "normal." This is America. The dancing, and the shooting. The gospel music, and the blood and death. This is America.

It’s like when I was hanging out with my Mexican-American neighbors, watching music videos in Spanish. (My Spanish is limited to a few basic polite phrases. Gradually getting better, living in the Southwest, but it’s a tough haul bc my brain just isn’t wired that way.) The video was beautiful: people dancing and celebrating in a beautiful rural setting. And the beat made me want to get up and dance, my old white self. Afterward I remarked on this to my neighbor, and only then noticed tears in her eyes. “He’s singing about being poor and hungry,” she said.

I’d missed that part because I didn’t know the language. But once she told me what the video was really about, I was sad, too.

Like James Baldwin said, we can't change everything, but we can change nothing unless we face it. Let's face it, together.