See Arthur Jafa’s new music video for Kanye West’s Wash Us In The Blood

A few days after 14 art museums streamed Arthur Jafa’s searing film Love Is The Message, The Message is Death, which depicts violence against African Americans as well as the triumphs of Black culture, the rapper and producer Kanye West released a new music video directed by the artist on Tuesday. Wash Us In The Blood, from West's forthcoming album God's Country, includes much of the same imagery that is seen in Love Is The Message…, including found footage of clashes between police officers and protesters captured on mobile phones, coronavirus patients gasping for air, poignant scenes showing Breonna Taylor dancing and Ahmaud Arbery running (both were killed in racially charged events), as well as clips of a giant blazing sun. “The sun is the appropriate scale at which to consider what’s going on,” Jafa has said of the work. “It’s fundamentally an assertion that black people’s lives should be seen on a cosmological level. I want you to look up at these things that are happening to black people, not down—the way you would stare at the sun.”