During the Country Music Awards last night, country superstar Brad Paisley did something that doesn’t happen too often in the country music world — a good thing: He talked about race. Or, joked about it at least.
The award show bumped ABC’s Black-ish from its usual spot. So Paisley made what seemed like only a fitting joke: “If any of you tuned into ABC tonight expecting to see the new show Black-ish, yeah, this ain’t it. In the meantime, I hope you all are enjoying White-ish.”
USA Today claims that people thought the joke was racist. A few people did tweet about it — particularly because it seemed ill-timed to coincide with a performance by former Hootie-and-The-Blowfish-lead-man-turned-country-star Darius Rucker, who’s black.
But if Paisley’s joke was just supposed to be ribbing country music for being so white rather than mocking Rucker — which I think it was — then there’s not only nothing wrong with it. It’s actually a good thing.
Conversations about race in America almost universally focus on “race” as the identity of non-white people. When American media identifies something as having a race, that race is almost always black or Asian or Latino or Native. “Race” is hardly ever taken to mean “whiteness,” unless you’re looking at a census form.
But shouldn’t it be? I don’t mean that we should be advocating for white history month or talking about white people’s oppression. Just, simply, that we need to start treating whiteness not as a default but as yet another socially-constructed racial identity, one that comes with a lot of privileges.
In recent years, people have become more aware of whiteness as a racial identity in and of itself rather than the absence of one. Stuff White People Like, for example, brought a kind of consciousness to whiteness that wasn’t there before, even if it was in the form of a joke. And now there’s a more serious exploration of whiteness as a race that’s catching a lot of attention in America: “The Whiteness Project,” a PBS-funded documentary series that examines what white people think it means to be white.
The series has become a spectacle because of some of the truly horrific things people say on the show — “you can’t even talk about fried chicken or Kool-Aid without wondering if someone’s going to get offended,” says one woman. But the show’s director, Whitney Dow, articulates perfectly the need to encapsulate white identity. “I made this project for white people, not for people of color,” she told the Guardian last month, “if white people are going to participate in changing the racial dynamic, we need to deal with our own shit first.”
Paisley is certainly a weird messenger to deliver a wake-up call that white people need to deal with their own shit. His previous explorations of race have been pretty misguided; he’s the same guy who last year paired up with LL Cool J to perform the song “Accidental Racist,” a really bizarre hip-hop/ country mash-up that compares Paisley wearing a confederate flag shirt to LL Cool J wearing baggy pants. But he’s also got a really important audience on hand: Country music fans, aka relatively affluent white southerners, a group that could certainly stand to become more aware of their own whiteness.