My name is Halley, and I need to call myself out. This is going to ramble before it makes sense, but I think I’ll get to my point eventually. This summer my sister has been on a crusade to keep the bittersweet from strangling the plants in her yard. Bittersweet is an invasive plant with vines that creep up trees and slowly strangle them. If you cut it down and don’t pull up all of the roots, it begins growing again. It’s nearly impossible to win the bittersweet battle without constant vigilance against this pervasive and persistent foe. The worst part? Bittersweet is pretty. It looks kind of nice while it strangles the native plants around it.

I think this is terrific way to look at anti-racism work. Just when you think you’ve made some progress on your own understanding and education, you realize your racist roots grew another vine that’s crept into your subconscious. I try to be an ally. As a white lady, being “nice” has been programmed into me just as deeply. I try to do a lot of things. Sometimes I get it right, and lots of times I get it wrong.

At my last Zoom concert I mentioned that Lauryn Hill didn’t particularly like white people. A colleague at a jazz organization I used to work at told me that years ago. It came as a surprise, but I didn’t really blame her for the sentiment. Historically, white people have a pretty bad track record with how they treat…Everyone. So, I chose to mention it in passing during my concert and didn’t think much more about it, also adding that she got in some tax trouble a few years back.

There. Did you feel it?

It was that vine creeping in. If I was playing a Willie Nelson song, would I mention his well-documented tax problems? Unlikely.

The cringe-worthy nature of today’s digital archiving of human life is that nothing goes undocumented. Upon re-watching my 90’s R&B concert, I wondered what actually happened to Lauryn Hill. Did she really say she hated white people? What if I looked back at Lauryn Hill in the same way that I recently decided to re-examine what happened to Monica Lewinsky? The #Metoo movement and Black Lives Matter asks us all to take a closer look at what we have considered normal. Nothing about this dangerous behavior should be normalized, and yet, it’s all many of us know. The vine has been here for so long, we thought it was part of the original landscape.

I’m embarrassed to admit it took minimal research to discover that Lauryn Hill never said that she didn’t like white people. Never. The rumor began in 1996 on the Howard Stern show when someone called in and claimed that Lauryn Hill said she’d rather her children starve than have white people buy her music. The caller claimed he saw it on MTV.

There’s a saying that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” [erroneously credited to Mark Twain].

MTV had no such footage. They even made a statement to that fact. But Lauryn Hill was a talented political activist who had a major platform. In the “colorblind,” post-racial 90’s, Lauryn Hill spoke an unapologetic, inconvenient truth. She was a Black woman who didn’t need you to like her. That must have pissed a lot of people off.

I wonder who that caller was. Was it white fragility that made him take what was probably a strongly worded statement about white apathy or police brutality and twist it into such an extreme? Did he believe what he was saying? And why oh why did this particular unsubstantiated claim take flight? (you and I both know why).

Lauryn Hill’s talent and contributions are often overshadowed by her personal life. Was she in a cult? Did she pay her taxes? Was she mentally ill? What really happens when a woman decides she doesn’t want to be part of the pop machine? This Rolling Stone piece from 2003 unveils the bigger problems at play for Hill. Her relationship with Wyclef Jean, her pregnancy at the top of her fame, and her desire to be credited for her work played out on a world stage. When you are larger than life, how do you continuously live up to those expectations? Many pop stars don’t.

In the 90’s, I was a kid. I passively took in what MTV and the rest of the music industry fed me. Record companies were at the height of their power, and whatever narrative they wanted to spin was what we got. Interestingly, this particular rumor couldn’t even be quashed by the PR machines. It is just the plain old ugly power of white fragility that keeps it afloat.

So, I’m sorry Ms. Hill. To the people who show up to hear me sing and talk about the cultural significance of songs and people, I apologize for spreading misinformation. I clearly have some more digging to do.