Songs of White Privilege and White Supremacy
We don’t have to “cancel” them all. Let’s just listen and learn.
Songwriters are so misunderstood — especially around election time, and usually by Republican candidates. In 1984, Ronald Reagan tried to pitch Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” as patriotic anthems. Donald Trump attempted to do the same in 2016 with Canadian Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Both failed to realize they were blasting rockers that eviscerate, not celebrate, the so-called American dream.
Then there are songs like “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” — a Bob Geldof/Midge Ure co-composition that meant well but in the end, made some ghastly lyrical missteps. Band-Aid’s UK charity single characterized Africa as a vast wasteland desperately in need of a Western (i.e., White) rescue mission, making it essentially a White-savior narrative masquerading as season’s greetings.
“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was a massive hit over the 1984 holiday season and soon inspired USA for Africa’s “We Are the World.” In that 1985 call to alms, co-writers Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie thankfully avoided characterizing the entire continent as “a world of dread and fear,” and the song itself, unlike the earlier hit, prominently featured Black voices.
