Donald Glover Allegations Explained as Black Women Remarks Raise Questions

Following the release of his new TV show Swarm, Donald Glover is facing a fresh wave of accusations that he "hates Black women."

The rumor has plagued his career, and a recent interview with Glover featuring Swarm star Dominique Fishback has ramped up the rhetoric online. Many people are sharing snippets of a recent Vulture interview, suggesting once again that for some reason Glover doesn't like Black women.

He addressed the notion in April 2022 when he interviewed himself for Interview Magazine, but the answer he gave to his own question did nothing to dismiss the rumor.

Addressing the issue in Interview Magazine

Notorious for doing little press these days, Glover, who also creates music as Childish Gambino, decided to interview himself during the press run for Atlanta Season 3.

During the fictional back and forth, he asked himself about comments made by Black social media personality and psychologist Dr. Umar Johnson who criticized Glover in 2018. Reviewing Gambino's "This Is America" music video, Dr. Umar said the inclusion of a "White Queen" was a "contradiction" and "diluted his message."

"Yes, he has a right to discuss the Black Experience but wanting to have that experience with a white woman clearly says he doesn't value it enough," Dr. Umar wrote. Glover said he disagreed with Dr. Umar's opinion.

He asked himself pointedly: "Are you afraid of Black women?"

"Why are you asking me that?" Glover replied to himself.

"I feel like your relationship to them has played a big part in your narrative," the fictional interviewer version of Glover asked.

"I feel like you're using Black women to question my Blackness," the version of Glover that was being interviewed replied.

His failure to address his own question about whether he was afraid of Black women had people speculating online. Billboard wrote a summary article highlighting a number of Twitter users who called out Glover for the "ridiculousness" of the interview and that question.

"For chaos reasons, now I need a Black woman to interview Donald Glover since he said he's not afraid of us," Somali-American writer Najma Sharif wrote at the time.

Atlanta's final season

Glover found huge success with his surreal/realistic dark comedy Atlanta, which wrapped up with the release of Season 3 and 4 in 2022.

As the final season was playing out a Buzzfeed article written by contributor Shamira Ibrahim suggested: "Donald Glover doesn't know what to do with Black women."

Ibrahim's criticism centers around the Season 4 episode "Light Skinned-ed," which portrays a number of Black women within Glover's character Earn's family. Referring to one character, Ibrahim accuses Glover of making a character a maximalist rendition of the Sapphire trope: inexplicably hostile, combative, and alienating." The Sapphire trope is a negative portrayal of Black women in cinema and TV as the "Angry Black Woman (ABW)," according to Ferris State University's Jim Crow Museum.

Character motivation in Swarm

Glover's latest TV show is Swarm, a Prime Video collaboration with playwright and TV writer Janine Nabers. Starring Fishback, Swarm is a psychological horror about an obsessive fan whose love of a pop star takes a dark turn.

The series has been well-received by critics and fans, with moments from the show going viral online.

Despite collaborating and creating Swarm with a Black woman, the narrative surrounding Glover and his thoughts about Black women are not going away. Journalist E. Alex Jung wrote "oh he's not beating the allegations" as he shared an excerpt from his Vulture colleague's article featuring quotes from Fishback and Glover himself.

Glover explained in the Vulture article how he and Fishback didn't talk about her character Dre's backstory. "I 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." Glover acknowledged this made it harder for Fishback. "She really was lost a lot of the time," and Glover said he told Fishback, "think of it more like an animal and less like a person."

Glover continued: "It reminds me of how I have a fear of dogs because I'm like, 'you're not looking at me in the eye, I don't know what you're capable of.'"

Fishback's character in Swarm, Dre, is an obsessive fan who starts to head down a murderous path as she gets closer to her favorite pop star Ni'Jah.

Glover's latest comments in Vulture didn't sit well with others though. "Dude just hates black women so much lmfao," @mersrulesworld_ wrote in response to Jung's tweet, getting over 1,800 likes. "He said it really loud on the record," Jung replied seemingly agreeing.

Entertainment TV host Nina Parker simply replied "Jesus." After reading Glover's statement. Writer and producer of Time Bandits and A Black Lady Sketch Show, Akilah Green said: "Enough is enough."

"That man does not like Black women," entertainment critic Carolyn Hinds wrote on Twitter. "[He] keeps showing that, yet people don't want to believe and accept that."

There were others who stuck up for Glover in the same thread. "What a weird take, it's a character," one user wrote while another said that Jung hadn't "watched the show but wanna be mad at something."