At almost every turn, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican running for governor of her state, has voted against Black people’s interests. In 2021 she joined two other Republican senators and introduced a measure to rid classrooms of critical race theory, because she claimed it promotes “division by seeking to dismantle American society.” She voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the George Floyd Act. And in April, after the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the gubernatorial candidate, referring to the state’s largest Black city, wrote on X: “I urge our state legislature to reconvene to redistrict another Republican seat in Memphis. It’s essential to cement @realDonaldTrump’s agenda and the Golden Age of America.”
Despite all her documented hostility toward the Black voters of her state and their interests, on Tuesday, Blackburn posted an artificial intelligence video of herself in the place of the Black hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar performing his hit “Not Like Us” during the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans.
It would be impossible to name everyone who falls under the Compton rapper’s “they,” but we know it includes MAGA Republicans like Blackburn.
Blackburn’s hypocrisy is galling. Kendrick Lamar’s catalog is mostly made of songs about Black people being locked outside of mainstream America. “Not Like Us,” a diss track aimed at Drake, has the mantra “They not like us, they not like us,” and it’s a line in the sand about who Black people should accept and support. It would be impossible to name everyone who falls under the Compton, California, rapper’s “they,” but we know it includes MAGA Republicans like Blackburn.
Even so, her X account released the short AI-generated video showing her mimicking Lamar’s halftime show moves. The other AI-generated people with her are backup dancers: Rep. Tim Burchett, Sen. Bill Hagerty and state Sen. Brent Taylor, along with WWE wrestler Kane, whose real name is Glenn Thomas Jacobs, former mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. Blackburn captioned the post “Tomorrow. Ready to roll.”
“You’ve taken my Blues and gone,” Langston Hughes writes in the first line of his 1940 poem “Notes on Commercial Theater.” The poem accuses white entertainment moguls of taking Black art forms, changing them “So they don’t sound like me” and making them more palatable for and marketable to white audiences. Using an AI program 86 years later, Blackburn does the same thing to hip-hop, which is currently the most dominant form of Black musical expression.
According to PEN America, the Trump administration has banned almost 600 books written by Black authors or authors representing minority groups, or books dealing with slavery, from Defense Department schools. Black studies programs at colleges and universities have been disbanded. And companies have rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. In 2017, Lamar was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his album “DAMN.,” which the award committee praised as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”
Nothing about that description suggests Blackburn would be a fan. It seems more likely that she would find a way to signal her disapproval. But still, she released a video putting herself in Lamar’s place.
Blackburn’s video isn’t blackface in the technical sense, but it’s blackface in the figurative sense. She’s mocking a culture she has no respect or appreciation for. I take Black music seriously, and in response to Blackburn’s hypocrisy, I find myself, like the title of a Hughes short-story collection, “Laughing to Keep from Crying.”
The brilliant thinkers Hanif Abdurraqib and Lauren Michele Jackson suggest that not every example of cultural appropriation is problematic. Cultural appropriation happens every day, and at times, they point out, the people doing it are not aware that they’re doing it. But that’s clearly not the case here. Blackburn made a campaign video using a catchy Black song and an iconic Black cultural moment to promote her candidacy — even as she favors weakening Black political strength and silencing voices who rightly condemn systematic racism.
No matter what AI-generated slop she puts out, “She not like us.”
The post The irony of Marsha Blackburn’s problematic campaign ad seems to have gone over her head appeared first on MS NOW.
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