With her visual album Lemonade, Beyoncé sampled and recontextualized centuries’ worth of imagery of black women. Now, with his new video for “The Story of O.J.,” released shortly after his new album 4:44 early this morning, Mr. Carter is taking on a whole other history of representations of black people.

“ ‘The Story of OJ’ is really a song about we as a culture, having a plan, how we’re gonna push this forward,” Jay Z (who is now styling his name JAY Z) explained on iHeartRadio for his new album’s premiere. “We all make money, and then we all lose money, as artists especially. But how, when you have some type of success, to transform that into something bigger.”

This framing informs the animated “The Story of O.J.” music video—the full version of which is, for now, only available to Tidal subscribers. Update, July 7: The video is now available to all on YouTube.

The animated video plays on America’s long history of racist cartoons from Fleischer Studios, Warner Bros., and Disney, among others. In the video, Jay voices the cartoon character Jaybo, whose name is a reference to both the racist Little Black Sambo books and cartoons from the early 20th century and (as the second half of the video, which features Jaybo flying by flapping his ears, makes clear) Dumbo, a Disney movie with its own set of racist caricatures.

In the four-minute video, Jaybo walks through Brooklyn and uses the lyrics of “The Story of O.J.” to narrate images of such racist archetypes as mammies, pickaninnies, and Uncle Toms, which the video mashes up with more realistic imagery of slave auctions, lynchings, and burning crosses. A number of images in the video also directly echo specific old racist cartoons, such as when a rendering of Jaybo eating a watermelon closely resembles the image in Walter Lanz’s Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat of a caricature of a black man happily eating a thick slice of watermelon. Meanwhile, the song samples Nina Simone’s own examination of black stereotypes, “Four Women.”

Unfortunately, the song also engages in some stereotyping of other groups. In the second verse, Jay holds up Jewish people as an example of how to make better investments, saying, “You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit./ You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.”

But in the end, the video, co-directed by Jay himself and his longtime collaborator Mark Romanek (who previously directed Jay’s “99 Problems” and “Picasso Baby” videos), underlines the song’s not-so-subtle message that no matter how successful a black man becomes, America will always see him as lesser. Jay contrasts with O.J. Simpson’s notorious idea that—as others quoted him as saying in last year’s excellent documentary O.J.: Made in America—“I’m not black. I’m O.J.” As the video’s pitch-black final images make clear, and as LeBron James recently said in his emotional statement after his house was reportedly spray-painted with racist graffiti, “No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, being black in America is tough.” Or as Jay’s old collaborator Kanye West once put it, “Even if you in a Benz, you still a n---a in a coupe.”

This apparently caused a ****storm on Twitter and I bet we could have some awesome opinions on this.

I'm guessing that because there were weird contradictory images of terrorists in it I am supposed to feel uncomfortable? But all I see is a black dude being a bit edgy and surreal and it's not at all obvious he's arguing for the genocide of his own people.

Also not sure what you mean by surreal. I see concrete racist imagery and a pretty clear message. Doesn't seem very surreal to me. Also who are the terrorists?

Also who are the terrorists?

Actually your critique of the video is exactly in line with the one legit criticism of the video: the trope that Jews are "good with money", and that the African-American community ought to try to emulate Jewish covetousness. This is disturbing on a few levels, given the historic mistrust between Blacks and Jews, that it feeds into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and not the least because Jay-Z once compared Hitler favorably relative to Stalin.

Also not sure what you mean by surreal. I see concrete racist imagery and a pretty clear message. Doesn't seem very surreal to me. Also who are the terrorists?

Maybe I'm just not used to this newfangled Twitter thing.

Also, as far as the message goes: yeah, he is telling Black people not to blow their money on stupid ****, but as far as the tweet you saw about White people being pissed: the more salient point of course is that every black person is still a n***** in a White society, even "I'm not Black" OJ, and that his suggestion to be more frugal (while perhaps futile), was simply meant as a band-aid for that terrible truth.

It was whites who pointed to OJ and his success as token evidence of a post racial utopia that would have been pissed, but honestly I think those folks are a dying breed.

Poor people obviously can't get the money to earn money so it's kind of a slap in the face to suggest that