Author’s note: The following open letter concerns about the state of country music, but I’d like to dedicate this post to the one and only Jason Black, and I’d like to just be as real as possible about what country music has devolved into.
Dear Mr. Black,
First, as a woman whose ancestry is actually a mix of a bunch of different things, but honestly, Mr. Black, I’m in a state of lamenting what country music is supposed to be. For the black population, country music once could have been a good possible avenue, but with a white supremacist anthem such as “Try It In a Small Town” by Jason Aldean, we have a huge problem. Forget the lack of authentic bluegrass instruments in the music, we are now facing a lyrical crisis. The stereotypical bullshit against the black population Aldean sings about could also have very well been about my Cajun family. the Hebert family (mind the French spelling) had been sold right and left as slaves upon being expelled from the Northern Acadia homeland, the blood line that produced my Papa (Rodney Hebert) settled in Beaumont, Texas, strangely enough one of many places you can’t turn the radio on and not hear country music. I’ve been to Texas only once, to Dallas for some stupid conference I was forced to attend, the National federation of the Blind, equally as racist.
It sickens me to see that Jason Aldean has joined the White Supremacist Fan Club. I wish that Cletus T. Judd could fuck with this song because as it sits here, the song sucks. My partner, Clay, believes the same. It just plain sucks.
The sad fact we’re all about to become unaware of, and this is really heartbreaking, is that more than half the country instruments originate in one way or another in a West African setting. The Banjo, for example, not only has an African word that bears its name, but the stringed instrument was played first by the Africans of differing tribes, but forget which ones, the white people wanted to make the blacks so much less human than their pale flaky selves. These white masters were just so cruel they’d simply hijack all the fiddles and banjos and all other musical instruments and they’d have told their slaves they were not allowed music or literacy. You can’t expect a people this oppressed to stay that way forever. black people and women, different vulnerable groups of any sort usually will come kick the dominant oppressive idiots in the proverbial ass. White supremacy and the Confederate cause have had their way in NASCAR as well. Forget Bubba Wallace. For a long time, I was a NASCAR fan, but before I could say one more word, I found what this association of stock car auto racing really stood for. Of course, NaSCAR has been attempting to clean and paste their good side all around, but the ratings for races are no longer what they were. NASCAR clearly began in places like Daytona Beach, Florida, an hour or so away from my growing up space in Titusville, a seemingly nondescript coastal town thirty minutes also from Canaveral National Seashore and the Kennedy Space Center. My adopted father, David Taurasi, worked this space center for practically all my life, first working the shuttle program from about 1989 until it sunset in 2010. Last I checked, David now works the Artemis project, sending man to the moon. White supremacists are also trying to backpedal all black women in STEM as well.
Regarding the Florida educational standards, Mr. Black, I’m horrified. I’m not 100% white, and my Cajun ancestors I swear are rolling in their graves. Beaumont, Texas might need a few good women in sciences. Personally, I’d ask if you and your brothers and such could donate a huge sum to get a black astronaut woman to the Artemis moon Project. I would do the same, and I wish my partner Clay and I could walk together on the moon’s surface. David clearly also had a Neil Armstrong commemorative Christmas orname,ornament, the famous words speak when you press a button on a disc below the feet of the figurine that looks like Neil Armstrong. David is a nut when it comes to space. We need more African Americans in STEM, and that leads me to another point.
I grew up in the Brevard County School system in Florida. Brevard County is so military brat that even clay made that observation when we were kinda browsing and looking at a recent school board meeting. It makes me kinda sick when this county being pro military has a boatload of disciplinary problems at its schools. It is very important that all children, even the ones in Brevard and other Florida counties learn the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the god honest truth. Clay and I named our son after Malcolm X, and it saddens me that his cousin, a little girl, was named for the first biblical wife of Jacob, Leah. He’s at the stage where this little guy loves to coo and make sounds, so as I type you this letter, he’s talking to me. I love to copy his little vocalizations, and I literally attempt to speak his narrow but opening and developing language. Malcolm came into this world on April 15, 2023 and he has become the light of both mine and Clayton’s lives. I’ve literally promised to fight for all of Malcolm’s aspects of life, including his right to a truthful education about all subjects. Malcolm was named after a civil rights icon that sadly, Leah will probably never be able to learn about. I can only imagine when Malcolm reads his namesake’s autobiography, and then Leah says, “But that guy was mean.” Malcolm would laugh and say, “What are you talking about!” He’d whip out the video to Malcolm X’s most prominent speech, the ballot and the Bullet. I love that speech because it essentially predicted what is happening now. Clay and I play endlessly with this kiddo, and I have begun to kinda change with him. But the painful reality becomes undoubtedly a surface issue, especially when Leah Taurasi, the daughter of an Italian American engineer at some jet firm, and a wife Lauren, a school psychologist, can’t even gain access to material that tells the truth about the shameful and cruel and heinous acts of white people. Leah will be imprisoned in a world filled with pale faces. She will never hear the field holler, or the siren song of black freedom. Only Malcolm, due to his geographic location in Denver, Colorado, could get access to the same education, but we’re planning way more for him because Colorado’s genocide education requirement doesn’t go far enough. The five steps to genocide, or Nazi Germany as you spoke of a while back, are pretty obvious in all the genocides of old and new. When people started whispering bad things about certain ethnic groups, Hutus were doing this in Rwanda, it got worse. Once you get to a point where you’re singing evil shit about opposite ethnic groups, Muslims in Kosovo for example or jews in the Nazi occupied Germany, you’re pretty much dead. The final step in the White Supremacy takeover happening in America could happen sooner or later. clayton is predicting a second civil war, and I’m actually pretty sure it might happen in our lifetimes. However, clay does not endorse Confederate shit or the extreme Boogaloo movements. I could care less what anyone endorses, if the Second Civil War were to occur, I’m outa here. I’d pack clay and the kids up, grab all my black buddies and head for Toronto. If I’m crazy for doing this, tell me now. The worst thing I could imagine happening could be my ex, Trenton, being roped into being “sold south”, a term the slave would use to refer to being placed in a southernmost state plantation with the cruelest “massa” imaginable. It’s pretty silly people say. I won’t let our Malcolm be a sacrificial lamb for the Second Civil War, but if he wishes to fight, I have written a personalized song for him. It has his name written in it, and if that’s not enough, well, I hope that he can be in uniform for a side that does not favor Florida’s governor.
Mr. Black, I want to finally address a small blip in the radar. You said females were in charge of marriage. Mr. Black, in about 75% of this entire global population, that is actually untrue. In many remote African tribal villages, it is the male elders and fathers who make all the marriage decisions for their daughters, selling them for a value that befits what the groom will pay. A lot of times, bride sales in these places spell plenty for the family selling the bride. Poorer families don’t want to rely on Heifer International, or send the daughter to school. It makes me mad that fathers would dare do this all the time. In Yemen, a man is told that if he wants good luck, “marry a nine-year-old girl.” If that’s sick, if you think that’s bad enough, look at the life of Nujood Ali. She was famously divorced at age ten. This young lady was forced to marry Faez Ali Thamer at age nine or so. She was pulled out of school in San’A, the capital city of Yemen, and forced to relocate to a village called “Khardji” which is an Arabic word for “outside.” Thamer raped Ali for a period of about six months I’d wager, but Ali went to court and begged three judges to grant her a divorce because she was fed up. If that isn’t badass, I don’t know what is anyhow.
It is all rampant patriarchy that has ruled the world for what seems like forever.
Thank you for your show, and I enjoy your broadcasts.
Beth
Leave a Reply