Monthly Archives: February 2010

John Mayer: The N Word the Least of the Problem

This got me out of retirement, kids.

Recently, the internets have been abuzz with talk of John Mayer, Gen Y’s Billy Joel, about a recent interview he did for Playboy magazine. People have been up in arms because he used the N word during the interview.

“Someone asked me the other day, ‘What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?’ And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass.”

There’s nothing worse than a white dude who is so comfortable with their racism, clearly because they have black friends, to try to let people know how down they are by trying to use the N word just like “the natives” would. This is the thing that he got in trouble for, and why he later issued a litany of apologies via Twitter, about.

But I find his later statements in the interview about actresses Holly Robinson Peete, Karyn Parsons and Kerry Washington, and black women as a whole, much more disturbing.

PLAYBOY: “Do black women throw themselves at you?”

MAYER: “I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.”

PLAYBOY: Let’s put some names out there. Let’s get specific.

MAYER: I always thought Holly Robinson Peete was gorgeous. Every white dude loved Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Kerry Washington. She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, “Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.” And you’d be like, “What? We weren’t talking about that.” That’s what “Heartbreak Warfare” is all about, when a girl uses jealousy as a tactic.

Now, let me say that he also discusses his sex life with his former girlfriend Jessica Simpson in detail, which is also repulsive, and with no regard for what that might mean for her. But for now, I am talking about the black women who found themselves in this story. It’s clear that he associates all these black actresses as some nearly-white enough in class, hair texture or affect as to be “white enough for his David Duke dick” to fuck, but clearly also views them, based on his description of his imagined Washington, as sexually as loose and irreverent as the white women he normally fucks. All of this is every kind of wrong.

What’s interesting is that Mayer felt compelled to apologize about the “Nigger Pass” comment, but not at all to the specific black women he demeaned in this article, nor the millions of other who are implicated in his disgusting little brain of his.

Here’s his whack-ass apology the other night from a show in Nashville, where he basically sums up these statements to his need to be clever and witty, and not on some deep-seated racism and white supremacy. Fuck you, John.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INgaBsxDFng&feature=player_embedded]

Now, I’m back. Anybody else got something to say?