Excerpt from "Could I break your heart like a white girl?":
PLAYBOY: It is true; a lot of rappers love you. You recorded with Common and Kanye West, played live with Jay-Z.
MAYER: What is being black? It’s making the most of your life, not taking a single moment for granted. Taking something that’s seen as a struggle and making it work for you, or you’ll die inside. Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude’s.
...Why don’t we hear about the collective struggle of white America?
John Mayer’s interview with Playboy magazine was revelatory; he exposed his true subconscious thoughts to the world. Whether or not he intended to do so is a question that will go unanswered for now. Like many of us, John Mayer has grown up with specific preconceived notions: stereotypes, images of others that is, at best, faulty. This is apparent in his response to the interviewer’s comment about Mayer being associated with various rappers. Mayer answers the comment by suggesting that the lives’ of rappers can speak for the life of almost every Black man. The history of rap can, of course, be associated with Black life in America. However, a Black man’s struggle is very uniquely tied into the fabric of everyday social interactions and conditions that Black people have to endure such as racial profiling, negative stereotyping, prejudice, and inferior treatment which unanimously construct the anger, bitterness, and shame that characterize Black existence. Mayer accurately includes the concept of social death into his interview, but clearly does not fully understand the meaning. The truth is that, no matter how many struggles John Mayer survived, he can never fully understand the life of a “black dude,” not even the life of one Black man, because he does not have the history of an entire nationality of people to subconsciously remember or to consciously live. Blackness extends to who Black men date, who they marry, how they raise their children, where they work, how they interact with their spouse, how they emotionally support their families, and much more. Talia is very right in asking: “Why don’t we hear about the collective struggle of white America?” Black and white cultures, or ways of living, are very different from one another because of the remnants of history that continue to structure our fragmented existence. Mayer should have spoken more in depth about why he has a “white-supremacist dick” because that is intricately woven into the history of whiteness not into the concept of “being black” in America.
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