Racism: Intention or perception?

     “No Light No Light”, the second single in Florence + the Machine’s second studio album Ceremonial once peaked at number 39 on the US Billboard Alternative Songs Chart. But this masterpiece has caused a fierce debate because of its controversial imagery. Though Florence + the Machine is a band famous for its dark style, this song really infuriates some people.

     Some people hold the view that this video is full of scenes of white superiority and racial discrimination. Is that true? Is the intention of the video to show how much better white people are than other ethnicity??

     Just take a glance of the music video below. Everyone may have their own interpretation =)

     I just want to say, whether this music video is a racism one is more about perception rather than intention. It is hard to tell if the director of this video has racism intention. One thing for sure is that different people hold different opinions towards the same video content because of different backgrounds and life experiences.

     For instance, the overall plot of this video is a white woman named Welch getting chased and tortured by a black contortionist and ends up falling into a group of white children. An African-American writer thinks that it associates black skin with evil while white skin with goodness. From that she draws the conclusion that this video is racist. But another American writer, on the other hand, has a completely different perception. She believes that it is a music video purely using symbols and metaphors. The contortionist symbolizes sense of guilt inside of Welch. This feeling follows her everywhere and keeps torturing her so bad that she chooses to free herself from it.

     Both interpretations make sense. So what causes the difference in perception? I guess this is mainly because African-Americans usually face more racial discrimination in their daily lives, which makes the concept of racism deeply rooted in their heads. Racism becomes their instinct reaction when visual products trying to distinguish black from white. On the contrary, research shows that the discrimination white people faced is far more less than their peer Latin or black fellows in US. So they are less likely to notice the black/white contrast and don’t think it in a racial-orient way.