Commentary by Devin McCue, Sumner Newscow — I was born and raised in Wellington, a town of around 8,000 people. I then moved to increasingly larger cities throughout my life, but I’ve always been proud of having come from a small town.

This is why I’m sick and tired of people portraying small towns as backwater hellholes full of bigots and morons. Whether it’s during elections when poll watchers parachute in to feign surprise that “farmers and simple folk” might actually know about complicated issues. Or how far-right “news” channels like Fox News treat us like we’re too stupid and scared to visit a city.

Because we aren’t stupid and hateful for the most part, we live in a rural area.

But I’ve never been so angry at someone coopting small-town identity as I was this week when a washed-up country music artist — from the fourth largest city in Georgia — Jason Aldean dropped a music video for his pro-lynching song, Try That in a Small Town.

Before we get into how harmful this video was, we need to look at the lyrics. Firstly, they barely even rhyme, indicating the song started out as a racist screed until the writer hastily shoehorned in a few rhymes to make in fit with a lazy guitar lick and an uninspiring band accompaniment.

Try That in a Small Town is a barely disguised lynching song.

Each verse rattles off a few crimes evoking harmful stereotypes about Black people, like robbing a liquor store, spitting on cops, carjacking, and more, followed by calls to violence by decent (white) people from small towns. It’s littered with racist dog whistles and fond remembrances of the days when “good ole boys” could “round up” (both real lyrics in the song) people of color that dared exist in their communities.

However, Aldean’s biggest dog whistle on the track is the constant allusions to sundown towns. Sundown towns were cities, or even counties, that were entirely white during segregation, where it was illegal for Black people to be in after dark. And in most sundown towns, the punishment for violating that rule was torture and public hanging without a trial: lynching.

There were sundown towns in every state in America, including Kansas, so while I don’t think this song accurately describes modern small towns, it certainly lays bare some of our historical sins.

Some of the lyrics that call back to sundown towns come from the song’s chorus: “Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road.” The track goes on to say, “You cross that line. It won’t take long.” It’s disgusting and brings to mind a clip from HBO’s show Lovecraft Country where the main characters escape such a town.

That’s where the video comes in.

You won’t need to look further than the site Aldean chose to perform to know what he’s trying to say in this song. The entire video takes place in front of the Maury County Courthouse Building in Columbia, Tenn., the site of a 1946 race riot and the 1927 lynching of a Black man named Henry Choate.

Columbia, Tenn., is a small town that Aldean has no connection to, and its biggest claim to fame other than these racist events is being the self-proclaimed “mule capital of the world.” So, unless Jason loves to marry horses with donkeys, I think it’s safe to say he went there for other reasons.

The video only breaks from the lynching site and Aldean’s puffy face long enough to show the viewers clips of stock footage and protest videos where scary city folks (Black people) are committing property damage. Unsurprisingly, however, most of the clips aren’t even American and some aren’t even from protests.

After the clips of masked Black men in hoodies finish and Jason Aldean sings to the Neo-Nazis he’s trying to court. The video ends with a vague montage where farmers and little girls in white dresses pause to look at the sunshine and wheat.

The entire production is soaked in bigotry and is a ploy from Jason Aldean to make a hard-right turn since he hasn’t had a hit for years, and Big Green Tractor isn’t pulling in the cash like it used to. And small towns like ours are now the poster children for that kind of rhetoric.

Small towns aren’t anything like Aldean wants us to be. We are diverse communities, with some people being as politically liberal as anyone on the coast, but that isn’t useful to Aldean, Fox News, and racists like them. They need us to be as bigoted and racially homogenous as we were in the past so they can sell us the fear of the cities and create an “us vs. them” mindset for the rural and urban populations.

We’re more alike than we are different, and a**holes like Jason should keep our names out of his mouth because if he tries that in an actual small town, he might not make it down the road.

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