Try thinking instead, Jason Aldean

Let’s take American country music singer Jason Aldean at his word. He really doesn’t grasp that he didn’t have to sing about “Black people,” “Democrat-run cities,” or “Black Lives Matter protests” to gin up gun-toting rogue vigilantes.

- Mary Sanchez

He was just talking to his people, the “good ‘ol boys,” as he says. 

The Georgia-born country star got himself into quite a pickle. 

He’s now at the center of heated arguments and vast misinterpretations of gun violence, police use of force on citizens and the protests it spawns, as well as the merits of city vs. country living.

His song, “Try That in a Small Town,” is being pulled from rotation on country stations.

And the level of backlash and carefully constructed criticism of Aldean’s video performance of the song is as plentiful as the crude social media slams being launched at him.

Aldean insists the song was intended to be his anthem to the values of neighborliness.

“ ‘Try That In A Small Town,’ for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief,” he posted on Twitter on June 18.

Except that, it’s not. Not even close. Rather, Aldean leveraged a literal arsenal of dog whistles to race in America in the song’s lyrics and imagery.

For the accompanying video, he used a historically significant town square of Columbia, Tenn., where a lynching of a Black teenager happened in 1927 and another almost did in 1946. The second, during a race riot, would have taken the life of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.