Erykah Badu Doesn’t Regret the Kind Words She Said About Hitler

One might hold the opinion that Erykah Badu is a little like Kanye West in that she believes that even the most hated public figures deserve love.

West used that philosophy to explain his recent support of Donald Trump, and Badu used it to say something positive about Bill Cosby and Adolf Hitler earlier this year.

“I’m a humanist. I see good in everybody. I saw something good in Hitler,” she said. “Hitler was a wonderful painter. Okay, he was a terrible painter. Poor thing. He had a terrible childhood.”

Needless to say, the backlash was swift and severe.

But in a new interview with The Guardian, Badu said she doesn’t regret her words, and that people get outraged too easily nowadays. The singer also said she understands the backlash because we’re all living in a very tense climate right now.

“I don’t regret anything. I don’t like to make people feel uncomfortable or bad. But people are very sensitive in this climate,” she explained. “It’s very understandable. I totally understand. I get mad with them. I get it. But no, I would never take back a message of love. I’m sorry that it was misunderstood. But not sorry for saying it because it was from a place of love. And sometimes that happens.”

The “Mama’s Gun” creator isn’t the only person who’s said folks are easily outraged these days, and many experts attribute it to social media.

In fact, a 2013 study from Beihang University in Beijing, showed that anger is the No. 1 emotion shared on social media, and joy was a distant second.

And in 2017, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University said outrage and social media are so intertwined that people sometimes express anger out of habit.

“The definition of a habit is a behavior expressed without regard to its consequences,” said Molly Crockett, Phd. “One speculation … is that social media might disconnect our expressions of outrage from our actual emotional experiences.”

“We could be going through the motions of expressing outrage online without actually feeling the emotion very deeply ourselves,” she added. “This could be a problem if it creates collective illusions of public outrage, where everyone is expressing it but few are actually feeling it.”

Badu also touched on this theory in her Vulture interview and said she didn’t want popular opinion to shape her ideas or beliefs or be bullied into not thinking for herself.

But the Texas born-singer also said if people went back to that Vulture interview, they would see that she was only trying to see the good in people, as opposed to defending their horrible actions.

“I guarantee you, if you read the article completely, there’s no way a third-grader wouldn’t understand what I meant” she told The Guardian reporter. “But if you did not continue to read then you won’t. I would say read it again.”