Photo Credit: Morgan Wallen/Instagram
Country music star Morgan Wallen was caught shouting the N word at friends and got roundly denounced for it. BMI asked their diversity adviser Bebe Winans in a statement to “reach out to Morgan to help him understand the gravity and impact of his words. Our hope is that BeBe’s outreach can help Morgan become a more inclusive and empathetic person.” And that was because he had their 2020 Song of the Year, Whiskey Glasses.
He told Good Morning America in his first sit down about the event in July, he said, “Before this incident, my album was already doing well; it was already being well-received by critics and by fans,” he told host Michael Strahan, five months after the video surfaced. “Me and my team noticed that whenever this whole incident happened, that there was a spike in my sales. So we tried to calculate … how much it had spiked from this incident. We got to a number somewhere around $500,000, and we decided to donate that money to some organizations, BMAC [the Black Music Action Coalition] being the first one.”
Now 8 weeks after he announced his intent of making a donation, BMAC says they haven’t heard a peep from him. They said they were “disappointed that Morgan has not used his platform to support any anti-racism endeavors.” While the group received some money from Wallen, they said the $500,000 number “seems exceptionally misleading.” And to follow up on whether he’s made any other donations, Rolling Stone checked with 56 other national, state and regional black led or black founded charities and none reported receiving anything from him.
While this is a bad situation, we’re going to acknowledge what little he did donate. After all, he was dropped from label shortly after the video came out. He should have made a more realistic pledge for donation, though.
