Toby Keith - Advocate of lynching?

[Tom]

I haven't heard the song, only the read the lyrics. It seems beyond question to me that the song advocates lynching. The question is whether the lynching it advocates is racially motivated, and I believe that it is. While he doesn't say literally "hang black people," he refers to rounding up "boys" and wanting to do away with "gangsters" and "crime in the streets." I take these as racial code words. Others can have other opinions that would be no more or less right than mine, but that is what the words say to me.

Also, the song specifically refers to Texas. According to this page, Texas had more lynchings than any state except Mississippi and Georgia. And while I have no firsthand knowledge of these Texas lynchings, it seems likely that they would have combined elements of "frontier justice" and the racial killings associated with the deep south. So the references to western themes do not preclude racial killings.

In any case, I find the song repugnant.