When Donald Glover landed a writing job for 30 Rock in 2006, he was still a dramatic writing student at NYU, and NBC had recently introduced a diversity initiative that would allow for the network to hire Black writers for their shows without these writer’s salaries affecting their budget. Though his start in comedy and pop culture was largely “a diversity thing”, as he described it to GQ, Glover, as a creative, is not solely defined by his identity as a Black man.

Throughout his incredibly diverse career, Glover has demonstrated his talent as a creative artist through his ability to authentically portray his racial identity in music, television, and film. Despite the differences in these respective mediums, Glover is consistently able to make a lasting impact when it comes to racial representation in media.

The political relevance of Glover’s 2018 single ‘This is America’—a song that he describes at trap music’s ‘We Are The World’—serves as a perfect first example for the way that he’s able to represent racial injustice in his music, and use his platform to draw attention to the realities of Black people in America. Containing a collaborative pairing of powerful lyrics and an incredibly intentional music video, courtesy of director Hiro Murai, this track has earned Glover four out of his five Grammys.

The music video featured images of gun violence, police brutality, cars engulfed in flames, as well as the fear and chaos that mirrored real-life situations in the U.S. at the time. For example, Glover shooting down a church choir is a direct reference to the 2015 Charleston Massacre in South Carolina, where a white supremacist gunned down members of a black church congregation.

Prior to the final scene of Glover being chased by a crowd in a dark hallway, he is seen in a lot full of presumably abandoned cars with open doors and active alarms. This image adds to the growing chaos and panic throughout the duration of the music video, but it may also be a reference to the victims of police brutality stopped at traffic checkpoints.

In addition to its references to recent racially-motivated crimes, the video also included a few more subtle allusions.

Glover’s exaggerated posing and facial expressions may be an allusion to 19^th and 20^th century Minstrel shows that depicted dehumanizing portrayals of Black people for the entertainment of white audiences. After shooting the guitar player—a main turning point in the video itself—Glover strikes a pose that resembles the stance of the discriminatory Minstrel character Jim Crow, a name affiliated with the enforcement of segregationist laws in the United States.

While in the warehouse, a black figure can be seen riding a white horse, a biblical reference to end times from Revelations 6:8. In the King James Version, the verse itself reads: “And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill him with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Not only is the figure of Death present in these riots, he receives a police escort.

In looking at the verse itself paired with the visual in the music video, it implies that these officers are a humanized Hell, and that they are given the power to kill the “beasts of the earth” at all costs. Historically, people of colour were considered to be subhuman by white people, and were awarded a place between human and beast in The Great Chain of Being. This use of symbolism hints at the systemic values of American law enforcement and the patterns of discrimination against Black people that policing as an institution perpetuates.

It may come as a surprise, but the song started off as a diss towards Drake, with the line “this is America” as a punchline towards the Canadian rapper. The song was then transformed by the current state of the U.S., prompting this same line to morph into a political statement rather than a clever one-liner.

Glover told GQ that his writing process for the song was heavily impacted by the riots and uprisings that overtook the streets of major cities in the country at the time. He describes culture as the “compression of information”, and ‘This Is America’ objectively succeeded at compressing the political climate and realities of people of colour into a single moment.

Not only was Glover able to create a single and music video that encapsulated the political climate of America at the time, but he was intentional with ensuring that the song itself felt like a moment in time.

He wanted the music video to establish its prominence in modern culture, which meant taking inspiration from defining moments of pop culture past. To achieve this, Glover looked to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ to “[study] how [it] became iconic.”

Along with the clear challenge of condensing racial discrimination in America into less than 4 minutes, Glover was tasked with ensuring that the song earned the attention that it needed, leaving him with the question of “how do you make people care about anything anymore?.”

The solution to this, in his words, was to “have a moment in real time.” Thanks to his time simultaneously hosting and starring as a musical guest for a Season 43 episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Glover was able to secure the “moment” that this track deserved by debuting the music video during the airing of the live episode and performing it on the show within the first hour of the video being online.

As of late March of 2024, the ‘This is America’ music video has amassed over 909 million views, with about 12.9 million of those views being from within the first 24 hours of its release; and in my opinion, Glover succeeded at building a moment around his accurate depiction of racial discrimination in the U.S..

Glover likewise demonstrated his ability to authentically portray race on television through Atalanta—a shamelessly Black FX series that rejected the idea of selling reassurance and comfort by capturing the realities of Black men in the city.

By prioritizing a Black narrative, Glover didn’t concern himself with accommodating white audiences. He explained the importance of this choice to  The New Yorker by saying that “blackness is always seen through a lens of whiteness—the lens of what white people can profit from at that moment.”

Atlanta’s ability to accurately represent the realities of Black men can be attributed to Glover’s collaborators on the project. The writer’s table was filled by members of Royalty—an all-Black collective of Glover’s close collaborators. 

Stephen Glover, member of Royalty (and Donald’s younger brother) took the role of the show’s head story editor. The pair of brothers used the show as a way to represent their similar experiences as Black men, especially having grown up together just east of Atlanta, in confederate-flag-covered Stone Mountain, Georgia.

From a young age, society showed them that “what was being offered on Sesame Street didn’t exist”, that this idea of equality somehow didn’t apply to them. This led them to turning to comedy as a coping mechanism; “that life was a bad dream and that laughter was a way to wake yourself up.”

This philosophy on humour is evident when watching Atlanta, but its punchlines stand out from other shows on the air, as jokes are not at the expense of racialized individuals.

“I don’t even want [the audience] laughing if they’re laughing at the caged animal in the zoo,” Glover told the New Yorker, “I want them to really experience racism, to really feel what it’s like to be black in America.”

Motivated by the message of  “do what others cannot” that Glover plastered across the writer’s room whiteboard, season three of Atlanta was more ambitious and experimental than the earlier releases had been. Though it wasn’t incredibly well-received by the public—and resulted in a 61% decreased in viewership—Glover maintains that this season was his favourite, as it was “not like the show Atlanta that people wanted, but [showed] the point of view of Atlanta.”

“I love so much about that season, cause […] it’s not like a warm hug, […] it’s the feeling of your friend, who’s never left Atlanta, going to like San Francisco or Paris and being like ‘I like it back in Atlanta’”, he told GQ.

Even while creating the season, he and the writing staff knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but Glover believes that “[viewers] deserve something that isn’t easy for everyone to digest all the time.”

The concept of “trojan-horsing” is a staple of many television creators, and is used to defy expectations beyond external appearance. Glover took this principle one step further for Atlanta, making the “thing that looks like a horse [turn] out to be an alligator.”

Over the course of its four-season airtime, the show itself received two Golden Globe Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards—one of which making Glover the first Black person to ever win the award for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series in 2017.

In addition to Atlanta’s commercial success, the series reinvented the wheel for race representation on television. The show was infused with authentic portrayals of life as Black men in the American South—thanks to Royalty--, but it didn’t cater to white viewers or accommodate to their comfort level. It provided an honest, yet still entertaining, perspective on the realities of racism and the Black experience.

As for the importance of representation in media, Glover has a personal connection to a specific Black character he watched as a child—a character he would eventually go on to play in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Despite the pop culture ban in his very religious household as a child, Glover became entranced with Star Wars. His dad, Donald Glover Sr., would take him out of school to see the prequels in theaters, and had given him a Lando Calrissian action figure that he cherished.

Prior to Mace Windu’s first appearance in the 1999 release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Calrissian was the only Black character in the franchise—or as Glover joked with GQ, “Lando: the first black man in space.”

In 2010, Glover made his first Star Wars-related cameo while voicing Mace Windu, a Scout Trooper, and a Stormtrooper in Robot Chicken’s adult depiction of Episode III.

Years later, after hearing a rumour of Lando’s revival in a new film, Glover told his agent that he wanted the role. His agent wasn’t sure how likely it was that he would succeed in this endeavour, which only pushed him further.

After landing the job of portraying the galactic gambler, he immediately called his dad to tell him about his upcoming role. While filming on Canary Islands, he was able to bring his father on set, which he would later describe to Esquire as “the best part” of playing Lando.

A few days before the start of filming for Solo: A Star Wars Story, he met the original Lando, Billy Dee Williams, for lunch to get some advice on keeping the character’s legacy and reputation intact. During this meal, Williams gave him the secret to playing Calrissian—“just be charming.”

Along with being the original owner of the Millennium Falcon, Calrissian’s appeal is his smooth talking, maverick-esque nature, which Glover claims is a rarity in modern media. The charismatic character has maintained his status as “pulpy” and dynamic despite his age and prominence, due to his generally unspoken origins and lore.

Glover is now fully involved in the franchise, as he has an upcoming collaboration with his brother on a new Lando-based project, and has also had his face and body scanned into Lucasfilm's digital repository for any future use.

Glover’s contributions to racial representation in mainstream media serve as incredible examples of his talent as a creative, but what is he doing differently than others?

In his cover story for Interview Magazine in 2022, Glover opened up about his philosophy when it comes to representing the experiences of racialized individuals, and said to “just focus on your perspective, not your ‘Blackness’”. By rejecting the stereotypes and societal assumptions of “what it means to be Black”, and instead speaking on his own authentic experiences, Glover is able to provide an unfiltered and genuine outlook on racial identity that is unique from other perspectives being shown in modern media.