Yesterday morning, a fellow named Justin McGowan asked his local country station to play a song from Beyoncé's new album. The New York Times tells us what happened next:
The station manager, Roger Harris, emailed Mr. McGowan back with a concise rejection: “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.”
Mr. McGowan put a screenshot of the rejection on social media, tagging a Beyoncé fan group in a post that drew 3.4 million views on X and sparked conversations on Reddit and TikTok. “This is absolutely ridiculous and racist,” Mr. McGowan wrote, urging people to email the station and request the song.
Why do so many people lunge for the r-word as a first resort? Beyoncé isn't a country singer and Harris was unaware that she had dropped two country tracks on Sunday. His response was perfectly reasonable, and he reversed course when he found out that Beyoncé is, in fact, a country singer, at least for the moment.
Not everything involving Black people is automatically racist. Let's save the word for when it really applies, OK?
Can everyone just untwist their knickers?
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-68309398
Apologies in advance to readers offended by the use of "knickers".
Well, not really.
Game changer.
Guy on internet said something silly. This is Joe Biden's fault.
Due AOCs reaction or non-reaction, Im going to have to vote for Trump now. Democrats are going to get crushed in the elections.
Thanks guy on internet, way to go.
I hope we get more updates on what another guy on internet says.
Narrator:
The exact same thing happened six months later involving Lana Del Rey.
But because she's white, no outrage machine fired up...
It's a big world. Did you know Lana Del Rey is releasing a country album in September?
And yeah, sure, "it's his job". But even for someone whose job it is, it's STILL a big world.
I'm sure for some people, every move Beyonce makes is headline news; but for plenty of others (including me) she's an inexplicably popular singer whose moves I have zero reason to track. I'm sure the same is just as true of someone who made the choice to work at a country station.
This is pretty low in the racism scale, having said that, while perhaps not ill intentioned, it does reinforce the long held prejudice against Blacks that is at the core of the multitude laws and initiatives like the current DEI initiatives in place in so many industries, which sadly and not surprisingly, make a whole lot of racists like Leo and James B Shearer go apeshit crazy, and which even many not tiki-torch carrying racists still seem completely blind at the challenges faced by non-Whites.
The person who contacted the station didn't just ask for them to play any Beyonce song. He asked for a very specific song providing the name of the song. If the station manager didn't know about the song, the right thing to do was to do a quick google search of the name to figure out which song was that. That would have taken him less time than typing the response he did. Instead he simply dismissed it off-hand by saying "we don't play Beyonce here".
There was zero curiosity or interest in trying to learn or figure out why a listener of a country station might be asking for a Beyonce song. He didn't want to dedicate a single second of his time to listen to the request and have a proper interaction. The sation had to wait until enough people complained about the matter to actually listen and correct their action. That is the exact same type of quick dismissal faced by so many Black people on far more serious matters, hence why it was rightly called out.
For as long as an entire group of people continue to be so easily dismissed and forced to fight and argue every single inch of the way for someone to actually listen to them on everything big and small, people should just shut up about trying to portray "anti-racism", or racism calls being overblown as the true oppression or problem that needs to be dealt with.
FBI informant charged with lying about Bidens’ role in Ukraine business,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/fbi-informant-biden-ukraine-charged-burisma
This is why it’s ok to fire journalists and run “news” sites out of business. Everyone pushing this “story” is an idiot.