BTW, when I said that Toby Keith was 'ever the literalist' I should have also explained with this song is about, literally.

The person Keith wants to lynch in this song is actually a 29 year old woman who was involved in the traffic accident that killed Keith's father, and left the scene of the accident, sometime in 2001 I believe. A few months after the accident (I can't recall when), a man arrested during a domestic dispute told police that his girl friend (whom he had been arrested for beating up) had caused the accident by striking Keith's father's truck, which in turn caused Keith's father to lose control of his vehicle, cross the median, and collide with a bus.

Keith carried out a very nasty and very public vendetta against the woman, in the tabloids, on talk radio, etc as well as in this cheerful little ditty. She eventually pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the accident, and received a suspended sentence, unsupervised probation, and 100 hours of community service. As I recall, the woman had no priors, so the sentence was pretty typical of those handed down for similar offense. Keith also dragged the judge who handed down the sentence through the mud too.

So the public lynching reference is actually about a woman, and is not a direct reference to lynching blacks. But without any knowledge of that background and context, the song sure sounds like a song celebrating lynchings as a means of meting out vigilante justice to me. People can deny all they want that the majority of victims of lynchings carried out in the US throughout our history were blacks, but that doesn't change that history.

While I don't believe that Keith intended this song to be a metaphor for lynching blacks, I believe it is easy to understand how people hearing this song, with no knowledge of the events which inspired it, hear this as a song celebrating lynching blacks, and therefore perceive it as racist. It is a song about vigilantism, about mobs lynching people to mete out their own vigilante justice. I think many reasonable people would agree, that image conjures up lynching of blacks, not cattle rustlers, for many Americans.

So while the song is about lynching a woman, not a black, (which doesn't make Keith look any better, IMO), it is certainly understandable, IMO, how the lyrics can easily be interpreted to have racial meanings, intended or not.

Toby Keith is, IMO, a dangerous man who has seriously confused the concept of justice with vengeance and vigilantism, and is getting rich singing about his hatred, his anger, and his uncontrollable desire for vengeance.