I agree. It doesn’t sit very well with me either. I’m trying not to assume the worst though and consider some things:
1)If this song is about MH, she goes on to the write The Smallest Man who ever lived about him, which includes a line that he deserves to be in jail. It is the most brutal track I have ever heard from her. So it is very clear that “But Daddy I Love Him” would be more of a snapshot in time before she understood who he really was.
And she goes on to add the song to her denial playlist of the 5 stages of heartbreak. It is literally supposed to represent mania and denial.
Also in BDILH she says “my good name, it’s mine alone to disgrace” but in Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me she goes on to say, “The scandal was contained,The bullet had just grazed,At all costs, keep your good name,You don't get to tell me you feel bad.” So I really don’t think it’s so clear she continues to believe everything she said in BDILH. Ofc her making it about her image and not standing up for what’s right feels off, but the thing is we don’t actually know what really happened beyond the image surface. This line does seem to be holding him accountable for at least some bad behavior.
2) She says herself in the prologue that she was not her most sane when she dated him and that he love bombed her and told her she reformed him. She also has a whole song about believing she could fix someone.
Is it the best social justice informed approach? No. At the end of the day, no. But it does seem less like bad intent and more like ignorance.
From the prologue:“At this hearing I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets DepartmentWith a summary of my findingsA debrief, a detailed rewindingFor the purpose of warningFor the sake of remindingAs you might all unfortunately recallI had been struck with a case of a restricted humanityWhich explains my plea here today of temporary insanity
…. In summation, it was not a love affair!”I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed deskIt was a mutual manic phaseIt was self harmIt was house and then cardiac arrest …
Because it’s the worst men that I write bestAnd so I enter into evidenceMy tarnished coat of armsMy muses, acquired like bruisesMy talismans and charmsThe tick, tick, tick of love bombsMy veins of pitch black inkAll’s fair in love and poetry.”
She may not call out his being racist specifically but she very clearly calls him a bad person and explains she didn’t feel in her right mind when she dated him.
3) We don’t know what’s actually true or how he presented himself to TS. It’s unlikely he said to her “I’m cool with racism” and more likely he made excuses or reframed what he’d said publicly. If TS had known him more personally for a while, it could have also been hard for someone to wrap their head around that this same person could be so callous.
4) But Daddy I Love Him could also be at least partially a Travis track.
5) His actions weren’t her own. I do wish she handled things differently, but I can also see wanting her to apologize for someone else’s sketchy behavior as a strange dynamic. Why should she apologize for him being problematic? It would likely be a PR nightmare.
The only ‘apology’ she gives is recognizing some of his problematic behavior, like calling his jokes “revolting” and pointing out his drug use and crashing his rental car etc.
This is all I got to understand it. I do think given everything, an anti-racist statement from her would have showed she at least takes this seriously and cares, instead of brushing it all off as creepy fans. So actually despite everything I’ve said, it definitely was a big misstep. There’s now a vocal group of fans saying we shouldn’t try to “control” her life or ladedada, and I get the point of how expecting perfect behavior from a human all the time is too much, but she definitely alienated a lot of PoC fans.
