how perplexed I’ve felt at liberals and even left-leaning people — not just white, black too! — leaning into the cowboy country wild western aesthetic. When people were falling over themselves about Lil Nas X fusing country with hip-hop and queering it, my only reaction was “Meh — what in country can be disentangled from white supremacy? Why would you want it?” Everything cowboy-ey is tinged with slavery and genocide to me, and it’s weird to see anyone desiring it at all. If you want some American Southwest desert culture that’s cooler, there were and are people living there who weren’t genocidal colonizing slavers! I cannot shake this feeling that fetishization of “country” is inherently white supremacist, even when queer poc do it, even when they obviously don’t mean it that way.

A lot of country music comes from gospel which came from slaves, either as part of religious worship or while working plantations. Many slave songs were meant to prevent slaves from talking to one another while working so they didn't conspire to escape or rebel. After slaves were freed, they kept these songs as part of the emerging African-American culture.

These musical traditions then changed and were built upon, turning into genres ranging from blues to the much, much later rock n' roll. And of course as this music got popular, white people began appropriating it. Country is one such example, where whites took black folk music for themselves.

There were more than black influences on the genre, obviously (such as Irish, Cajun, and Native American musicians), but country music has always been exploitation of the suffering that produced it by claiming it for white supremacy. Some black artists have tried to reclaim the genre, yet they do not get the type of spotlight of neo-nazi patriotic whites. They were never played on radio stations, which meant they never had a chance of gaining notoriety and influence. The genre was flipped from being something created by former slaves to something used to segregate the airwaves.

tl;dr-- you aren't going crazy. Country is fucking weirdo shit used by whitey to have some semblance of culture. But since whitey is morally bankrupt, he is creatively bankrupt and can only steal from others.