Nevermind his crass remarks on Jessica Simpson.
John Mayer is coming under fire for comments he makes about African American women in his controversial March Playboy interview.
Asked “Do black women throw themselves at you?” Mayer, 32, replies:
“I don’t think I open myself to it. My d*ck is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fu*kin’ David Duke c*ck. I’m going to start dating separately from my d*ck. …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 super hot 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 d*ck. Whatever.'”
A rep for Washington, 33, had no comment.
Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at the University of Florida and author of The Color of Crime, tells UsMagazine.com that Mayer seems to be saying “black women are not just not his type, they’re not in his class. They’re beneath him.”
Adds Laurie L. Mulvey, co-director of the Race Relations Project at Penn State University: “Both white people and people of color will be offended by Mayer commenting so flippantly about an issue that has caused so much pain in this culture, especially to black women.”
Mulvey tells Us that Mayer’s comments “create an atmosphere that is unfriendly to building trust and his words once again reinforce the idea that people of color are objects and white people are racist. This has particular impact when such words come from a celebrity who is admired by people of so many different backgrounds.”
Mulvey also says “choosing to invoke David Duke to explain these ethnocentric escapades flies in the face of Mayer’s self-congratulatory claim that he has a ‘Benetton heart.'”
Richard T. Ford, author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, tells Us that Mayer is “being deliberately provocative and since he assures us that black people love him — thanks for letting us know — it’s supposed to be okay.”
The problem: Mayer’s “tongue-in-cheek racism satirizes racial stereotypes and but also sort of traffics in them,” Ford tells Us. “Sarah Silverman does post racist very adroitly — she’s both hilarious and thought provoking. Mayer does it badly — he’s offensive and tiresome.”
Adds Ford, “Tragically, this is what passes for edginess for many celebrities today — someone blurting out the most crude and insulting thing that comes to what we might charitably call his ‘mind.’ Mayer did say one smart in the interview: ‘I think the world would be better off if I stopped doing interviews.’ Amen.”
