What did you learn from doing “Accidental Racist” with Brad Paisley?
I learned that not everybody’s going to get what you’re saying. You know, fukk it. I’m not apologizing for it. I believe in what I said. If somebody is crazy enough to think I was suggesting we do some tap-dance,
Amos ‘n’ Andy shyt, then that’s on them.
You got a lot of heat for saying, “If you don’t judge my gold chains, I’ll forget the iron chains” in the song. What did people get wrong about what you were saying?
I was looking at things from a very dispassionate, intellectual, and efficient way. You can’t have a logical conversation with people that are in their feelings. I was saying, “If you don’t let your past hold your future hostage, you can have a better chance of being successful in the future.” I was trying to humanize the black man to this racist and saying, “Yo, he’s a human being that you’re talking about and if you can get past that, maybe you would look at it differently.” And then the other side of what I was talking about was unconscious bias, where you’re not aware that you have a bias.
I thought the point of the song was that people need to communicate.
Without a doubt, man. Our song was about the cause, and the effect would be a conversation. But you have a lot of people who wanted to act like unconscious bias didn’t exist. It hit the third rail of some people’s emotions in a way that they couldn’t think logically about it.
Source: Rolling Stone
