ACCIDENTAL RACIST

From Salon:

Country star Brad Paisley releases bizarre “Accidental Racist” song 

Brad Paisley is among the biggest stars in the present-day country-music firmament, and his songs generally deal with such innocuous issues as partying, the Internet and drinking.

But with his newest song, Paisley has inserted himself into a racial debate.

“Accidental Racist,” a collaboration with the rapper LL Cool J, begins with Paisley’s apology to an unnamed Starbucks employee for wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag. “When I put on that T-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I’m a Skynyrd fan.”

More here.

Lyrics here.

Listen to it here.

Okay, it is a bizarre song.  And it makes some statements that would make anybody who's gone through some diversity training cringe.  And it's shallow, nearly as shallow as the kind of mindless patriotic crap released by various CW performers in the year or two after 9/11.  But it is not mindless.  Yes, it's far, far, far from perfection, but you know what?  I'm going to let that slide.  This is the conversation that white Southerners desperately need to start having with one another, to start having with blacks.  It's got to start somewhere, and Paisley, for all his imperfections as an analyst of culture and race, is clearly coming from a sincere and compassionate place.

For the record, my deep belief is that the Confederate battle flag, as a symbol of a hostile and treasonous regime based economically, politically, and philosophically on white supremacy, is just about as offensive as the infamous flag of Germany's Third Reich.  But the Germans went through a process of US enforced de-Nazification after WWII, as well as a decades long period of national soul searching, and, all the while, we, the victors, poured billions of dollars into their economy so as to rebuild the devastation left after the war.  This never happened in the South.  Indeed, the white Northern political establishment was completely content, in the end, to allow the rise of Jim Crow, to allow lynchings and other atrocities, as long as the Democrats were getting Southern votes.  And the South remained economically poor relative to the rest of the country, not really industrializing until well into the twentieth century.  It is no surprise, then, that a culture of resentment, mingled with the most important cultural element of the antebellum South, racism, has festered there for so long.  It's a Gordian Knot, to be sure.

That's why Brad Paisley has my support on this.  He appears to be the only Southern pride guy willing to stand up and do something about about a problem that has existed for a very long time before his birth.  We'll see where this leads.

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