I guess it's time to talk about Jason Aldean, but I am not going to spend too much time on him, specifically. Mainly, he was reminding me of something else.
I will address him, just in case anyone isn't caught up.
Country singer Jason Aldean released a song, "Try That in a Small Town". It subtly promotes racist violence. That became more apparent after the release of the video, which was filmed at the site of a notorious lynching in 1927 and race riots in 1946.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/20/1188966935/jason-aldean-try-that-in-a-small-town-song-video
This NPR article covers most of what I was seeing, but I will make two additions.
The less important one was many people pointing out that Aldean himself is not from a small town. He was not born in one, did not go to school in one, and does not live in one. His affiliation with small towns is more imagined than real. Actually, the could end up being important. The article does note that he is not the song's writer.
More disturbing is that in a promotional TikTok, Aldean featured an old article about the abuse a small town editor faced for speaking up on equality and satirizing racism.
It's not necessarily easy to find a 1956 article from a small town newspaper; you have to assume that it being featured was deliberate. That means any defenses about people taking care of each other in a small town and it not being about racism at all rings hollow.
The song is about supporting each other in racism.
Looking for an article summarizing that, it was not too surprising to see that there has been harassment against a TikTok creator who pointed out that some of the video footage supposedly portraying big city violence in the United States is stock footage from Europe.
https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-jason-aldean-video-destinee-death-threats-1850673721
One of the funny things for me was a meme going around of John Mellencamp being able to write a song about a small town without it being a racist dog whistle. While that is true, there was also his misleading footage and prejudicial song about Portland. I wrote about that just two months ago:
https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2023/06/seeing-portland.html
To be fair, Mellencamp's "Small Town" was from 1985; it's been a while. It was long ago enough that he had added the "Mellencamp" but not yet dropped the "Cougar".
Now, it would certainly be possible to spend some time on people talking about family values with an undercurrent of racism, like Ronald Reagan starting his presidential campaign in Neshoba County, speaking about "states' rights" where three Civil Rights workers were murdered just sixteen years earlier.
That is not a coincidence or an accident; that is delivering the key to the code that when you say "states' rights", "law & order", and "family values" what you mean is white supremacy. If you are pro-racism, pro-slavery, pro-misogyny, pro-marginalization of everyone beneath you -- because it means that there are people beneath you, and you like that -- we want you to know that we are for you!
Then, because it's a dog whistle, if you would never say that you are pro-racism, but "family values" and "law & order" sounds good to you, and you don't mind the racism so much as long as it's not shoved in your face so that you have to admit the ways in which you are falling short, well, we can be a pretty good party for you too.
The problem with that is that there is so much cruelty on the white supremacy side that you have to constantly find ways to blame the people experiencing the cruelty for what is happening to them, which will harden your heart.
And I would not have even written this post, except for this nagging memory of something else a few months earlier.
That's where I'll pick up next time.
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