The 'Accidental Racist' Controversy

The interwebs erupted last week after Brad Paisley's new song 'Accidental Racist' debuted with a little bit of an assist from LL Cool J.  After listening to the song and reading plenty of the commentary about it, I want to offer my sincerest congratulations to Mr. Paisley and Mr. Cool J.   This song was designed to be controversial and it was designed to be so provocative that, like a car accident that motorists slow down to gawk at, everybody was going to hop on YouTube and give this song a listen.

It wasn't what I was expecting, I'll give them that.  For some reason, I've come to associate Brad Paisley's music with fun, vaguely dirty humor (see: 'Ticks', 'Online', 'Alcohol') more than serious topics like racism (I don't know how you'd make a fun, upbeat song with vaguely dirty humor about racism but I was curious to see if Paisley had attempted to and if so, what had resulted.)  So I was surprised when it was sort of a dreary, depressing song that seems to center around the fact that he doesn't want to feel judged for wearing a Skynyrd T-Shirt to Starbucks on Main Street.

For his part, LL Cool J doesn't want to feel judged for wearing saggy pants and a do-rag I guess.  And overall the message of the song seems to be that if we don't judge each other and let the past be the past, we can all get along just fine.  (I'm not going to re-print the lyrics-  find them here and take a listen to the song over here.)

Personally, I don't find Skynyrd T-Shirts to be all that racist.  Everybody knows that Skynyrd is all about 'Southern Rock' and provided it actually has Skynyrd's name somewhere on it and given the real, honest to goodness issues of race that this country has to deal with if people want to start picking fights over t-shirts, well then, they kind of need to grow up. Do-rags don't bother me all that much and if it's judgemental of me to think that people that chose to walk around with their ass hanging out of their pants look like idiots, then so be it- but given the fact I've seen plenty of white people do it too, I don't really think that's racist of me.

What did bug me about this song was Paisley's view of history.  The idea that we should just let bygones be bygones is a tricky notion when you think about it.  Do I think we should go down south and blame the people who live there now for starting the Civil War?  No.  I think that's dumb- it was 150 years ago and most of the people down there didn't have anything to do with it.  But I also think we can't ignore it either. 

When The Quiet Man and I went down to Shiloh for the 150th Anniversary last year one of the more revealing facets of the trip was just how alive and real the Civil War is down South as a posed to up north.   Part of that probably stems from the fact that most of the Civil War was fought down there but I got the feeling that even now, the conflict is less academic and more personal for folks down south than it is for folks up north.  I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that was marking the 150th Anniversary but his t-shirt was for 'The Southern War of Indpendance' and not 'The Civil War.'  The visitor's center at Shiloh had three donation boxes- one for Union States, one for Confederate State and one for states that were Territories at the time of the Civil War.  The boxes for the Union States and the Territories were empty.  The one for the Confederate States was bulging at the seams.  None of this really offended me all that much-- but what did bother me was the sight of a young renactor standing guard at the entrance to the Military Cemetary where the Union soldiers are buried.  He was snapping out salutes and posing for pictures- but he was in a Confederate Uniform.  (It bothered me but I also think it was kind of a good thing too-  sent a message that every soldier in that conflict was an American.)

Where this song fails and fails badly, to me, is in the cookie-cutter ideas of history that Paisley plays with.  This is not going to be easy for a lot of people to just sweep under the rug.  Is it an idea worthy of thoughtful debate and discussion?  Yes.  And that's a good thing- and I get that you can't really pack a lot of historical analysis into one country song- but I also think it's a little crass to write a song that you know is going to be controversial just to get paid.  Which is what this feels like.