DROOPY PANTS = SLAVERY, LYNCHING, AND JIM CROW: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS ANALOGY?

Lost in the news of Margaret Thatcher's death yesterday was a kerfuffle about "Accidental Racist," a bizarre, misguided duet by country singer Brad Paisley and rapper LL Cool J. The song

laments how difficult it is to be a white man wearing a confederate flag on his shirt in the south. "To the man that waited on me at the Starbucks down on Main, I hope you understand," the song begins, "When I put on that t-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I'm a Skynyrd fan/The red flag on my chest somehow is like the elephant in the corner of the south."

From there, Paisley offers up half-apologies and mea culpas for the Civil War, slavery and the region's history of institutional racism, intoning that he should not have to bear the consequences of the South's brutal past....

Then, LL comes in to offer his perspective as a black northerner, with some references to poverty and racial profiling.

"Dear Mr. White Man, I wish you understood," he raps, "What the world is really like when you're livin' in the hood/Just because my pants are saggin' doesn't mean I'm up to no good."

From there, they duet, agreeing to listen to each other with a more open mind.

Racism solved, obviously....

I'm sure Paisley thought it was a brilliant idea to bring in a black performer to give him cover on this. But that just places the problem in high relief. The Confederate flag is the flag of slavery. It became a defiant symbol of the South of lynching and disenfranchisement and apartheid. Now, on the other side, what do LL and his fellow African-Americans get disrespect for? Let's go to the lyrics:

If you don’t judge my do-rag...
I won't judge your red flag...
If you don’t judge my gold chains...
I'll forget the iron chains...

So wearing hip-hop clothing is as much an affront to white people as enslavement was to black people?

The only way this would make any sense would be if African-Americans controlled a large territory or state in which white people were, at various times, sold as property, denied full citizenship, and subjected to state and pseudo-state terrorism.

But maybe, if you're Brad Paisley, and Drudge and Fox News and the NRA regale you daily with lurid tales of violent urban "flash mobs" and marauding gangs of drug dealers, you become afraid to walk through black neighborhoods, so you think, "Yup, there is a place where blacks oppress the white man!"

(Also see the quote from Craig T. Nelson that Atrios regularly cites: "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No" -- Atrios's theory being that angry whites like Nelson "believe there's some secret super generous welfare system that only black people have access to.")

So the subtext of this song is: oppression in America has been a two-way street. If he can look across the whole of American history and say that, that's appalling.


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UPDATE: Videos of these keep getting removed from YouTube. Try the new one above. (Ignore the "Sweet Home Alabama" snippet at the beginning.)

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UPDATE: Try this one: