Take the Racial Accounting Out of Your Nose
A voice of reason among the unreasonable.
WARNING: EXTREME RACISM
Lady Gaga liked some tired and unoriginal show tune. Which one? Stephanie Mills was flown to New York to sing “Home” for Gaga, from the Black excellence that is The Wiz . You know, The Wizard of Oz , but Black. Lol.
By Mills’s cartoon-aristocrat account, Gaga did not smile, did not react, and looked at her as though she had two heads. Mills took photos on her phone and was told to delete them before she left, which is standard at a closed fashion shoot. Years later, Mills went on television, called Gaga a “culture vulture,” and demanded an apology.
For most of human history, the natural response to someone admiring your work was gratitude, or at least indifference. Artists have always wanted to be heard. They tour, they record, they audition, they beg radio stations for airtime, all in pursuit of the same thing: strangers who will listen and like what they hear. Now we are asked to consider whether the wrong stranger liking the right song constitutes an offense.
Suppose every unflattering detail is true. Suppose Gaga was cold, dismissive, and ungracious. A singer failed to appreciate another singer’s performance. That is an awkward afternoon, nothing more. People have awkward afternoons constantly. They meet heroes who disappoint them. They receive gifts they did not want. They are introduced to people who forget their names five minutes later. The usual remedy is to feel slighted, tell a friend, and get over it.
II The Ledger
Race did not enter this story through anything Gaga did. Mills brought it in herself. Gaga is a culture vulture, she explained, “because she was managed by Black men.” Specifically, Troy Carter, a Black executive who built Gaga’s career and has also managed John Legend, Eve, Nelly, Meghan Trainor, and Charlie Puth.
The evidence of Gaga’s cultural crime is not anything Gaga took, copied, or profited from. It is the race of the man she hired. If I declared my Korean grocer a cultural thief because his accountant is Irish, nobody would call it analysis. They would call it what it is.
What does Troy Carter’s race establish about Gaga’s behavior? Was he incapable of choosing his clients? Was his professional judgment subordinate to his pigmentation? Did a successful Black executive become an instrument of exploitation simply by managing a successful white woman?
Carter built a career in one of the most competitive industries in the world. He identified talent, negotiated deals, and made fortunes for himself and his clients. By any ordinary standard, that is an achievement. Under the logic of racial accounting, his achievement becomes a liability, his client list a moral ledger. He is no longer a businessman. He is an exhibit.
The accusation insults more people than it claims to defend. There is something particularly degrading about treating every interracial professional relationship as a potential crime scene. It reduces adults to racial representatives and their achievements to evidence in an imaginary prosecution. It tells a Black executive that his choices are not really his own, that they must be audited for racial loyalty before they can be respected.
Let us be plain about it: judging a woman’s conduct by her own race and the race of her employees is not cultural criticism. Mills’s accusation was racist. It was prejudice pretending to be analysis, and prejudice is not improved by acquiring a fashionable vocabulary.
This is not a one-off. Mills has criticized Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King for interviewing Michael Jackson’s accusers and R. Kelly, arguing that Kelly trusted King because she was Black and that the damaging footage should have been cut. When the complaint was framed as Black women failing to cover for their own culture, she agreed. This from a woman who had already said Kelly should go to jail.
In Mills’s moral universe, a Black journalist owes a Black man protection, and a Black manager’s work for a white woman is evidence against her. Conduct decides nothing. Race decides who owes what to whom.
Music has no racial owner. There is no customs checkpoint.
III No Passport Required
Stephanie Mills and Lady Gaga are American singers. They belong to a musical tradition in which gospel, blues, jazz, rock, soul, R&B, and pop have influenced one another for generations. Their contributions differ, their styles are distinct, and their histories are their own, but the musical inheritance is shared.
Music has no racial owner. There is no customs checkpoint between them. No passport is required to admire “Home.” No ancestral certificate must accompany the purchase of a record. No racial permission slip is necessary to enjoy a melody.
A song sold to the public is a product, not a border. Gaga liking “Home” took nothing from anyone. It took four minutes of her attention.
“Home” was written for The Wiz , an American retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Apply Mills’s racial ledger to it, and her signature song becomes stolen goods: a white author’s fairy tale, taken and reworked by Black artists. Apply common sense, and it is what American culture does: one story, retold by new hands, made into something new.
The Wiz appropriated something original, which makes The Wiz unoriginal but Black. Liking a song, regardless of whether it is composed of influences originating with nonwhite artists, should mean nothing beyond this. But lunatic racists will claim the flesh is devoured by Whitey.
The song “Home” is a little American cultural product, offered to the public. Gaga, an American, liked it. No más.
Mills treats culture as racially defined tribal territory, its boundaries policed by ancestry and its treasures guarded against unauthorized admiration: a river here, a mountain there, and beyond them, strangers.
Except there is no river. There is no mountain. There is a shared country, a shared language, a shared musical inheritance, and two women who make their living singing. The border exists only in the accusation, Mills’s accusation alone.
Those who keep a racial ledger of culture rarely keep up with sanity. Black Americans are credited with things they had no part in conceiving; white Americans are told they have no culture worth crediting. Both claims are just the product of too much race-coddling and handling. Vile racism should be called out.
The border of reality and the Emerald City.
Follow the yellow bricks.
IV Measure the Claim
Even on its own terms, Mills’s paranoid and unsubstantiated accusation fails. A culture vulture, if there is a usual definition, is someone who adopts, profits from, or exploits a culture while omitting its source, never crediting said source.
Measure Mills’s account. Fucking nuts.
What did Gaga adopt? Nothing. What did she profit from? Nothing; she did not record the song, perform it, or sell it. What did she exploit? A serenade at a photo shoot.
The only loss Mills describes is phone photos she was told to delete, a routine rule at any closed shoot. Get iCloud, you crazy bitch. Nothing she described is cultural theft.
If one asks consumer AI, it will lie. Black performers aren’t routinely underpaid, uncredited, or locked out of venues and radio stations that enrich other performers singing similar songs. In the 1950s, record labels issued sanitized white cover versions of Black R&B hits and marketed them to audiences who were kept from hearing culturally different music. Songwriters signed away rights, yet there are claims they did not understand what they signed. Them’s the breaks, Charlie.
People are injured by Black-only or anything-only thinking. Nobody cares about race, except those who are content to be instruments of race warfare. Stop.
An accusation built on the races of the people involved, rather than on anything they did, can’t be satisfied. Gaga admired a conventional and unoriginal song, and for this she is not even human, degraded to what is perceived as lowly.
Gaga has a Black manager, and, shocker, a paranoid racist lunatic thinks this is a problem. Lady Gaga didn’t react the way Mills wanted, and this set off an alarm in the asylum of her mind. There isn’t a grievance. It’s paranoia looking for a target. Ugly racism.
Mills felt snubbed? Cry me a fucking river.
Oh, she wants an apology. What a contemptuous dolt. You won’t see her pointing to an identifiable injury and a proportionate remedy. Gaga could say, “Sorry, that day was a mess,” and the matter would still linger in Crazy Town and Racist City.
There are legitimate reasons to measure racial disparities. Historians, economists, and civil-rights investigators sometimes need such measurements to identify actual discrimination. But they do not always build a sufficiently usable model. Instead, we get perpetual grievance. Sound familiar? Investigation.
When someone tells us that a white singer has a Black manager, the sensible response is to say, “Shut up, you stupid fucking bitch.” If the answer is anything but silence, withdraw your attention.
A grown woman, Black or otherwise, who cannot encounter two people of different races without calculating their relative cultural entitlements has not met the requisite requirements for joining Team Civilization.
A song sold to the public is a product, not a border.
V The Dark Horse
Inequality of circumstance is often the very condition that makes an achievement heroic. The dark horse is celebrated precisely because the odds were unequal. Nobody calls the favorite’s predictable victory a Cinderella story.
The underdog doesn’t merely overcome the disadvantage; the disadvantage becomes part of the achievement’s meaning. We celebrate the overcoming of adversity, not the injustice itself. We needn’t preserve unequal opportunities to appreciate extraordinary victories.
Racial accounting, preoccupied with measuring disadvantage, too often forgets to recognize individual triumph. It keeps the ledger open long after the race has been run, insisting that the winner is still defined by the starting line.
The dark horse asks to be judged by what it accomplished, not permanently defined by where it started. The unequal starting conditions make the achievement more remarkable; they are incorporated into the judgment, then left behind.
A girl who rose from Brooklyn to star on Broadway as a teenager and built a lasting career has a story worth telling on its own terms. It does not need to be reframed as a ledger of debts owed to her by every listener who came afterward.
Anyone with half a brain can make the parallel observation about the law. A rule intended to establish fairness can become cruel when it refuses to recognize the particular circumstances before it. The law seeks consistency. Human judgment recognizes distinctions.
Sometimes a single, immediate consideration reveals a value that the general rule cannot accommodate. Equality before a rule is not always the same thing as justice in its application.
The same is true of racial frameworks: a principle designed to expose injustice becomes its own injustice when it is applied mechanically to situations it was never built to explain.
VI An Ordinary Song
“Home” is a song and, given Mills’s limited mainstream success, an important one in her career. It is also a fairly ordinary one.
Charlie Smalls wrote it for The Wiz as Dorothy’s big ballad, the show’s answer to “Over the Rainbow.” Its lyrics run on the stock language of gospel testimony and ’70s self-help balladry, and its shape is that of the standard Broadway power ballad: quiet verses, a gospel build, a belted climax.
Mills, at seventeen, sang it with real force, and that is much of why it lasted. None of this is an insult. Most songs are ordinary, and ordinary songs can still move people. But ordinary work does not entitle its creator to worship, and a listener who likes it incurs no debt.
Mills built an Emerald City out of the serviceable. No self-respecting vulture would bother.
No self-respecting vulture.
VII The Remedy
I do not particularly like Lady Gaga’s music. This is worth mentioning because it eliminates the easiest explanation for my objection: fandom. I have no artistic investment in defending her. I do not need her to be charming, gracious, talented, or particularly likable.
She may have behaved badly that afternoon. No more than anyone else. I wasn’t there, but fucking duh.
We have reached a peculiar moment when liking someone’s song can become a racial controversy, employing someone can become evidence of exploitation, and failing to smile sufficiently can acquire the moral dimensions of a historical injustice.
The remedy is not another racial calculation. It is the abandonment of the calculation when race has no demonstrated relevance.
Judge the behavior. Identify the injury. Demand evidence. Apply the same standards to everyone. Reserve the language of exploitation for actual exploitation, so that it still means something when it is needed.
Lady Gaga liked a song. Period. No border was crossed, nothing was taken, and no debt was incurred. Nobody owes anybody an apology.
But if Ms. Mills is curious how her accusation landed, we frowned, and then we laughed at her descent into low-IQ race-hustling paranoia.
A Note on Language
Some remarks in this essay may appear racially charged when removed from their context. That is deliberate. I have occasionally turned the language and assumptions of racial accounting back upon the person employing them, exposing the absurdity of the reasoning by applying its own standards.
The target is not a race. It is the individual who makes race the measure of another person’s conduct, character, or entitlement. Where the language is ugly, it is intended to reflect the ugliness of that reasoning, not to endorse it.
There is a difference between expressing racial contempt and ridiculing someone for expressing it. The distinction is not always apparent in an isolated sentence, but it is fundamental to the argument.
I reject racial accounting, including when it would benefit me. No racial identity grants immunity from criticism, and none constitutes evidence of wrongdoing. The same standard applies to everyone.
