“Accidental Racist”: Stumbling Through the Motions of Racial Reconciliation

Abstract

This article examines country star Brad Paisley’s controversial musical dialogue with rapper LL Cool J about race. First, I compare “Accidental Racist” with “Ebony and Ivory” in light of McPhail’s notions of rhetorical coherence and complicity. Second, I interrogate Paisley’s problematic construction of racial division in light of Gresson’s work. Next, I consider how the inclusion of Cool J’s voice at least partly challenges Paisley’s southern White perspective. In light of Hatch’s theory of reconciliation, however, Paisley’s pseudo-apology proves self-serving and Cool J’s forgiveness is cheap. In the end, their contrived country/hip-hop dialogue dances to the tune of neoliberalism and fails to resonate with either of their core audiences, despite their well-meaning intentions.

Keywords:

• Dialogue
• Neoliberalism
• Race
• Reconciliation
• Rhetoric of Music

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful critiques and suggestions.

Notes

[1] Brad Paisley, Lee Thomas Miller, and LL Cool J, “Accidental Racist,” Wheelhouse, CD, Arista, 2013. Lyrics are available at https://www.bradpaisley.com/music/songs/accidental-racist. The song can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSurzeGvPrQ.

[2] Richard Roeper, “Offensive on Every Level,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 11, 2013, accessed from Newsbank.

[3] Rashad Ollison, “There’s nothing accidental about practicing racism,” Virginian-Pilot, April 16, 2013, accessed from Newsbank.

[4] “Ebony and Ivory voted worst duet,” BBC News, October 6, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7031695.stm.

[5] Apologizing for Those Who Suffered as Slaves under the Constitution and the Laws of the United States until 1865, H. Con. Res. 96, 105^th Cong., 1st sess., http:/thomas.loc.gov/.

[6] Thomas Sowell, “An Apology for Slavery Would Not Advance Race Relations,” in Race Relations, ed. Mary E. Williams (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001), 165–168.

[7] “Apologizing for slavery—What’s the Fuss about?” ABC Nightline, June 18, 1997, accessed from eLibrary.

[8] Peter Cooper, “‘Accidental Racist’: Music appropriate forum for deliberate cultural debate,” USA Today, April 11, 2013, accessed from Newsbank.

[9] John B. Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (2003), 739–766.

[10] John B. Hatch, “Beyond Apologia: Racial Reconciliation and Apologies for Slavery,” Western Journal of Communication 70 (2006), 186-211.

[11] John B. Hatch, “Dialogic Rhetoric in Letters Across the Divide: A Dance of (Good) Faith Toward Racial Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (2009), 485–532.

[12] Ibid., 495-96. For a fuller explication of rhetorical voice, see Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001), 179–96.

[13] Peter Cooper, “Tough Questions are in Brad Paisley’s ‘Wheelhouse,’” USA Today, April 11, 2013, accessed from Newsbank.

[14] For instance, in the hit song “Southern Comfort Zone,” Paisley “celebrates travel and culture, reckoning that ‘I can’t see this world unless I go outside my Southern comfort zone’” (Cooper, “Tough Questions”).

[15] In 2007, the legislatures of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Alabama passed resolutions expressing regret and/or apologizing for slavery and legal segregation in those states. The following year, New Jersey and Florida passed similar resolutions, followed by the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2009, Connecticut apologized for its role in slavery, and the U.S. Senate passed an apology resolution like that offered by the House a year earlier but with a disclaimer against legal reparations claims. For analyses of the first three state resolutions, see Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 310–34.

[16] David Anderson and Brent Zuercher, Letters Across the Divide: Two Friends Explore Racism, Friendship, and Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2001).

[17] Hatch uses this phrase to characterize the work of reconciliation. See John B. Hatch, Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008), 17–18.

[18] For a seminal explication of the distinction between discursive and non-discursive symbols, see Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 30–32.

[19] Irving J. Rein and Craig M. Springer, “Where’s the Music? The Problems of Lyric Analysis,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986), 252.

[20] James R. Irvine and Walter G. Kirkpatrick, “The Musical Form in Rhetorical Exchange: Theoretical Considerations,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972), 272–84.

[21] Eric Robert Weisman, “The Good Man Singing Well: Stevie Wonder as Noble Lover,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985), 136–51.

[22] Carl B. Holmberg, “Toward the Rhetoric of Music: Dixie,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 51 (1985), 71–82.

[23] John J. Makay and Alberto Gonzalez, “Dylan’s Biographical Rhetoric and the Myth of the Outlaw Hero,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 52 (1987), 165–80.

[24] Robert Francesconi, “Free Jazz and Black Nationalism: A Rhetoric of Musical Style,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986), 36–49.

[25] Karen Rasmussen, “Transcendence in Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994), 150–73.

[26] Deanna D. Sellnow and Timothy L. Sellnow, “John Corigliano’s ‘Symphony No. 1‘ as a Communicative Medium for the AIDS Crisis,” Communication Studies 44 (1993), 87–101; Deanna D. Sellnow, “Rhetorical Strategies of Continuity and Change in the Music of Popular Artists over Time,” Communication Studies 47 (1996), 46–61; Deanna D. Sellnow, “Music as Persuasion: Refuting Hegemonic Masculinity in `He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,’” Women’s Studies in Communication 22 (1999), 66–84; Deanna Sellnow and Amanda Brown, “A Rhetorical Analysis of Oppositional Youth Music of the New Millennium,” North Dakota Journal of Speech & Theatre, 17 (2004), 19–36.

[27] James W. Chesebro, “Musical Patterns and Particular Musical Experiences,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986), 257.

[28] Deanna Sellnow and Timothy Sellnow, “The ‘Illusion of Life’ Rhetorical Perspective: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Music as Communication,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001), 395–414.

[29] Grady Smith, “Brad Paisley Talks about his LL Cool J Duet ‘Accidental Racist,’” Entertainment Weekly, April 8, 2013, http://music-mix.ew.com/2013/04/08/brad-paisley-ll-cool-j-accidental-racist/.

[30] Aaron D. Gresson III, America’s Atonement: Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the Pedagogy of Healing (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), xi.

[31] For instance, see Ollison, “There’s Nothing Accidental.”

[32] Eric Pederson, “Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Ebony and Ivory’: A History of the Hit 30 Years After Its Release,” Hollywood Reporter, March 29, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ebony-ivory-paul-mccartney-stevie-wonder-snl-305404.

[33] Paul McCartney, “Ebony and Ivory,” Tug of War, CD, Columbia, 1982.

[34] “Ebony and Ivory Voted Worst Duet.” For the SNL video clip, see Pederson.

[35] Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994).

[36] Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Complicity: The Theory of Negative Difference,” The Howard Journal of Communications 3 (1991), 1–13; Mark Lawrence McPhail, “From Complicity to Coherence: Rereading the Rhetoric of Afrocentricity,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998), 114–40. Moon and Flores offer a related critique of white abolitionist discourse for failing to escape the binaries of racial essentialism, and they commend intersectionality as an approach that both recognizes and decenters Whiteness within a larger complex of intersecting identities. See Dreama Moon and Lisa A. Flores, “Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness: Rhetorical Strategies of Domination among ‘Race Traitors,’” Communication Studies 52 (2000), 97–115.

[37] Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge.” Burke’s thoughts on tragedy and comedy as orientations are scattered throughout his works, both explicitly and implicitly. To understand how he characterizes and contrasts them, a good starting place is Attitudes 37–42. See also Brummett 218–20.

[38] Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

[39] Mark Lawrence McPhail, “A Question of Character: Re(-)Signing the Racial Contract,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7 (2004), 391–405. For a brief but seminal reflection on the oft-unnoticed reality of White privilege, see Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Invisible School 49:2 (1990), 31+.

[40] Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge,” Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, 10–12.

[41] Cooper, “Tough Questions.”

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] “Brad Paisley Song Controversy,” Wendy Williams Show, April 10, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dzW3vUQSnw.

[45] Eric Weisbard, “Brad Paisley’s ‘Accidental Racist’ and the History of White Southern Musical Identity,” The Record: Music News from NPR, April 9, 2013, http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/04/09/176675002/ brad-paisleys-accidental-racist-and-the-history-of-white-southern-musical-identi

[46] Ibid.

[47] Gresson, America’s Atonement, 92.

[48] Gresson introduces this concept in Aaron D. Gresson III, The Recovery of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

[49] Henry Giroux, “Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of Neoliberalism,” Communication Education 52 (2003), 195–96.

[50] McPhail counterposes this unwritten cultural contract with the social contract of human equality expressed in the founding documents of the United States. McPhail, “A Question of Character,” 391-92, 398.

[51] Mansfield, Brian, “Brad Paisley’s New Album is Provocative—On Purpose—But ‘Accidental Racist’ is Really Stirring a Debate,” USA Today, April 9, 2013, accessed from Newsbank.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Gresson, The Recovery of Race in America, 213-14.

[54] There was also a third collaborator in writing the song: Lee Thomas Miller.

[55] Hatch, “Dialogic Rhetoric in Letters Across the Divide.”

[56] Watts, 184.

[57] Ibid., 185.

[58] Hatch, “Dialogic Rhetoric in Letters Across the Divide,” 496.

[59] Hatch, “Dialogic Rhetoric in Letters Across the Divide,” 511, 516–17.

[60] Gresson, America’s Atonement, 125.

[61] Similarly, Moon and Flores critique new abolitionists (aka“race traitors”) for essentializing Whiteness as the root of social ills and inadvertently recentering Whiteness. A better approach to promoting racial justice, they argue, is the intersectional study of whiteness as a cultural identity interconnected with other identities. Such an approach would bring whiteness studies into dialogue with the work of Afrocentric scholars, feminists, queer theorists, and so forth. Moon and Flores, “Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness.”

[62] Hatch, “Beyond Apologia,” 191–92.

[63] Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 9.

[64] Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge,” 743.

[65] Burke’s thoughts on tragedy and comedy as orientations are scattered throughout his works, both explicitly and implicitly. To understand how he characterizes and contrasts them, a good starting place is Attitudes 37–42. See also Brummett 218–20.

[66] See Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 41.

[67] See Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 38; Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3d. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 4–5.

[68] Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 183–85.

[69] Sociologist Nicholas Tavuchis made the first concerted study of apologies (as personal expressions of regret) and their migration into public arenas; a decade later, the study of public apologizing burgeoned. See Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Roy L. Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: NYU Press, 1999); Aaron Lazare, On Apology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn, eds., Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Keith Michael Hearit, Crisis Management by Apology: Corporate Response to Allegations of Wrongdoing (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006); Girma Negash: Apologia Politica: States and Their Apologies by Proxy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007); Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For an important overview of the evolution of apologia and apology in rhetorical studies, see Emil B. Towner, “Apologia, Image Repair, and Reconciliation,” Communication Yearbook 33 (2009), 430–68.

[70] See Hatch, “Beyond Apologia,” 194. For more on the need in racial reconciliation to hold the public and personal together in tension, see Hatch, “Dialogic Rhetoric,” 493–94.

[71] B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the Generic Criticism of Apologia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973), 273–83.

[72] Hatch, “Beyond Apologia,” 187.

[73] Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 93–94.

[74] Hatch, “Beyond Apologia,” 191.

[75] Smith, “Brad Paisley Talks.”

[76] William L. Benoit, “Another Visit to the Theory of Image Restoration Strategies,” Communication Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2000), 40–44.

[77] See chapter 4 in William L. Benoit, Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies: A Theory of Image Restoration Strategies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

[78] Leonard Pitts Jr., “Brad Paisley’s ‘Accidental Racist’ not honest,” Miami Herald, April 14, 2013, http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/13/3340702/brad-paisleys-accidental-racist.html.

[79] Burke notes that the comic frame enables us to transcend wrongdoing and guilt by seeing it in a new light (Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 171). See also Ware and Linkugel, 280.

[80] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why ‘Accidental Racist’ Is Actually Just Racist,” The Atlantic, April 9, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/why-accidental-racist-is-actually-just-racist/274826/.

[81] Paisley’s expressed reasons for choosing Cool J were personal: mutual friends, a long-time respect for the rapper’s music, and an encounter in Nashville. Paisley also noted that he had considered Kanye West but decided against it because “it would have been instantly polarizing” for Paisley’s fans, and Paisley “didn’t want to do this with someone controversial.” Cool J fit the bill in Paisley’s mind, because “‘because I love his music and because he’s a legend in his format,” and “‘no one dislikes LL Cool J.’” Alison Bonaguro, “Brad Paisley Calls LL Cool J a ‘Blood Brother,’” CMT News September 27, 2013, http://www.cmt.com/news/1714738/brad-paisley-calls-ll-cool-j-a-blood-brother/.

[82] Aisha Harris, “Accidental Racism,” Slate, April 9, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/04/accidental_racist_brad_paisley_ll_cool_j_song_has_good_intentions_but_terrible.html.

[83] As Ollison writes, “when it comes to history, particularly the painful reverberations of American slavery, LL seems eager to recast himself in what author Toni Morrison calls the ‘master narrative.’ In other words, the Grammy-winning rapper/actor seems ecstatic about the opportunity to rewrite his role in the White man’s story of America” (“There’s Nothing Accidental”).

[84] Smith, “Brad Paisley Talks.”

[85] Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” American Rhetoric, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/abrahamlincolnsecondinauguraladdress.htm

[86] See David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2001).

[87] Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 143.

[88] Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 173–80.

[89] Giroux, 196–97.

[90] Hatch, “Dialogic Rhetoric in Letters Across the Divide,” 494, 506.

[91] Ibid., 496, 509, 515–16.

[92] Brandon Soderberg, “Dissecting Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s Politely Toxic Dud ‘Accidental Racist’,” Spin, April 8, 2013, http://www.spin.com/articles/dissecting-brad-paisley-ll-cool-j-politely-toxic-accidental-racist/.

[93] Chez Pazienza, “Brad Paisley’s ‘Accidental Racist’ Is Purposefully Stupid,” The Daily Banter, April 9, 2013, http://thedailybanter.com/2013/04/brad-paisleys-accidental-racist-is-purposefully-stupid/#JrslPxHRkjLQfu7t.99.

[94] “‘It’s amazing that in 2013 it would take courage to take a stand against prejudice,’ says Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter Bobby Braddock. ‘But I think that’s the case’” (Cooper, “Tough questions”). Braddock does note that younger country music fans are generally more open-minded than the perspectives heard on mainstream country stations, and songs like “Accidental Racist” are “a sign of country music starting to catch up with its audience.”

[95] Peter Cooper, “‘Accidental Racist.’”

[96] Terry Frieden, “Holder: U.S. A ‘Nation of Cowards’ on Race Discussions,” CNN.com, February 19, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/18/holder.race.relations/.

[97] Pitts, “Brad Paisley’s ‘Accidental Racist’ Not Honest.”

[98] Ibid.

[99] Frieden.

[100] Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 256.