Donald Glover Under Fire For Deplorable Treatment Of Women?
Donald Glover is yet again accused of hating Black Women following the release of his new series, Swarm.
In the latest edition of “Let’s Cause Drama Where There Isn’t Any” news, Community star Donald Glover has come under fire this week for supposedly hating Black women. “That man does not like Black women,” Newsweek quoted entertainment critic Carolyn Hinds. And this is something he has been dealing with his entire career- but the flames are reignited with the recent release of his series, Swarm — centering around a young Black woman.
“[He] keeps showing that,” Hinds goes on, “yet people don’t want to believe and accept that.”
Donald Glover has been making music as Childish Gambino and starring in hit series like Atlanta for some time, but this assumption that he doesn’t like women of his own race has been plaguing him nearly from the start. In 2018, he released a video for Childish Gambino’s song “This Is America” that featured a lot of metaphors about the African American experience. But, according to psychologist and social media personality Dr. Umar Johnson, his message was totally “diluted” because the singer had the audacity to include a white woman in the video.
The inclusion of this woman, described by Dr. Johnson as a “White Queen,” in Donald Glover’s video apparently signified that he doesn’t actually “value” the “Black Experience,” and just completely negated the argument he was trying to make.
In April 2022, Donald Glover interviewed himself for Interview Magazine as a part of his increasingly rare appearance in the press. In reference to that video and the surrounding backlash, he asked himself in the interview: “Are you afraid of Black women?” to which he responded with a question about why that question was even being asked.
The fictional interviewer then pointed out that his relationship with Black women has been a “big part [of his] narrative,” and Glover pointedly responded that “I feel like you’re using Black women to question my Blackness.”
But, obviously, instead of taking this answer as a sign that maybe the question was a silly one to be asking, more backlash ensued. Twitter users called his whole interview “ridiculous” and called for a Black woman to interview Donald Glover right away to see if he was really scared of Black women.
But, the trouble continued after Atlanta finished its third and fourth seasons. At that point, the show (and Donald Glover himself) were accused of creating a character that was a stereotype of the Sapphire trope, also known as the “Angry Black Woman.” The definition of the Sapphire trope is a Black woman who is “inexplicably hostile, combative, and alienating.”
Now, Donald Glover is being criticized yet again for his latest TV show, Swarm, a Prime Video series he created with playwright and screenwriter Janine Nabers, a real, live Black woman. The show is a psychological horror about an obsessed fan who loves a pop singer so much that they want to kill them.
The problem this time is that he told Dominique Fishback not to think too much about her character’s backstory. She plays the obsessed fan, so he wanted her to be confused about finding the humanity in the character – something he said should be left up to the audience. He thought that this would make her a more frightening character, which is important because, well, she’s the antagonist in a horror series.
But, that wasn’t the right move to make either, because Twitter users immediately said things like, “Dude just hates black women so much lmfao,” which pretty much leads one to believe that, no matter what Donald Glover says or does, someone is going to interpret it as him hating Black women.
Some people did stand up for Donald Glover, though, with one saying: “What a weird take, it’s a character,” and another adding that these critics haven’t “watched the show but wanna be mad at something.” Which at the end of the day, seems to be the main theme on social media lately: people just want to be mad about something.
