Lady A Speaks Out on Legal Battle With the Band Formerly Known As Lady Antebellum

The band is now taking Lady A to court in Tennessee over their ability to use her name, which is so psychotically anti-Black as to be laughable if the whole situation weren’t so twisted and sick. The one true Lady A spoke at length about her predicament in an interview with Rolling Stone, published on Friday:

I’m being erased. And that is something that this country is good at doing: Erasing Black folks and disenfranchised people they feel do not matter. I think that [the band] thinks I’m irrelevant, and that is a mistake. Just because I don’t have the same amount of fans that they have does not discount the fans I do have. It does not discount the hard work that I put in over all these years. So do I feel like I’m being heard? Not by them, no.

The folks who made the statement that Black lives mattered to them and the reasoning behind changing their name, I don’t want anybody to ever forget that. That is another reason for me to stay in my position and stand up for myself. It’s an insult to me as a musician and as a Black woman that you would say that Black lives matter and that you’d change your name but you didn’t really, and after a year we’re still in the same position.

And when asked what justice would look like for her, Lady A responded:

Real justice would have been very simple for them to just change their name. That would have been simple for both of us. It really doesn’t cost them a dime, doesn’t cost me a dime.

What I ask white allies and what I encourage to think about is “What have you actually done?” You’re upset and want to make a change; change should be very simple for us. All you have to do to make a change is do the right thing by people. We make it so hard. We spend money to research the research that we’ve already researched just to try to get to a decision about something that’s so simple as just doing the right thing.