Donald Glover has been plagued with the rumor that he “hates Black women” throughout his career. The latest storm started brewing after Twitter got its hands on a Vulture interview with Dominique Fishback regarding Glover’s new show Swarm.
Journalist Alex Jung tweeted out, “oh he’s not beating the allegations,” and shared part of the interview, where apparently Glover did not provide a backstory to Fishback for her character in the new Prime Video show Swarm.
“I [Glover] kept telling her, ‘You’re not regular people. You don’t have to find the humanity in your character. That’s the audience’s job.’” While Glover did acknowledge that this made Fishback’s job harder, stating “she really was lost a lot of the time,” he said that he instructed Fishback to “think of it more like an animal and less like a person.”
Glover continues:
“Actors in general, they want to get layered performances. And I don’t think Dre is that layered… I wanted her performance to be brutal. It’s a raw thing. It reminds me of how I have a fear with dogs because of how I have a fear with dogs because I’m like, ‘You’re not looking at me in the eye, I don’t know what you’re capable of.’”
Twitter has been aflame—one user responded to Jung’s thread, “We’ve seen Dahmer get humanized, Joe From You is humanized, The Joker, Norman Bates…with great writing it’s possible for a monster to be somewhat humanized…he not only insulted black woman but the audience as well.”
Another tweeted “Why are people shocked? He has put his disgust and disrespect for black women (especially dark skin women) in every piece of television media he has made.”
Some have stood up for Glover, tweeting on the thread, ‘What a weird take, it’s a character,’…while another said that Jung hadn’t ‘watched the show but wanna be mad at something.’
But, considering the broad swath of accusations he has faced in the past, Glover has not been defending himself well against those decrying that he hates Black women either. In a bewildering interview with himself for Interview Magazine last April, Glover gave us the following Q&A:
“Are you afraid of Black women?
Why are you asking me that?
I feel like your relationship to them has played a big part in your narrative.
I feel like you’re using Black women to question my Blackness.”
Additionally Atlanta, Glover’s show before Swarm, faced criticism of its portrayals of Black women.
“Among all the sharp, authentic depictions that have made the series so beloved, many of the characterizations of Black women remain superficial, slipshod, and rife with stereotypes… Glover’s depictions of Black women are a continued failure point for him, even though he has been lauded as an auteur of Black entertainment,” reported Buzzfeed News amid the fanfare for its final season.
Despite Glover’s collaboration with a Black woman on Swarm, it appears that this narrative will continue, until perhaps Najma Sharif, a Somali American writer’s words come to fruition, who said, “For chaos reasons, now I need a Black woman to interview Donald Glover since he said he’s not afraid of us.”