From the department of pot calling the kettle

Heh, lemme get this straight. Toby Keith makes a song calling for lynching and mob violence, as a solution to individual violence--which I guess is so much worse:

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he'd done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see

That Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune
And we'll all meet back at the local saloon
And we'll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing
whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
too much corruption and crime in the streets

Mostly on the racism joint, I give people the benefit of the doubt. I think a tin-ear is more common than straight bigotry. But that said, the more things change the more they stay the same. Keith may not be a racist, but he shares the racist's need to make Lex Luthor out of lilliputans. The white lynch mobs of old desperately needed to believe in the narrative of villanous black men obsessed with a collective deflowering the South's virginal white womenhood. Baloney of course--as is Keith's theory that we live in an era of rampant crime. But I'll give Keith this--his "Gangsters doing dirty deeds" is a more sophisticated strawman than the whole "Packs of crazed black men roaming the countryside hungry for the flesh virginal white women" number. I actually prefer the older version. What can I say. I like a little crazy. As long as there isn't too much burning. Or hanging. And the castration angle has to go.

UPDATE: Several posters make the imminently sensible point that the culture of the West isn't the culture of the South. I maintain mob justice is never good--but neither is conflating two groups of people. As always, I'll try to be sharper going forward