It was the year 2000. Unlike most 9-year-olds, I was already big into blues and classic rock. When my mom played ’90s pop in the car, I’d put on headphones and instead listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Allman Brothers on my portable CD player. When the late B.B. King and Eric Clapton released their music video for “Riding with the King,” she called me into the family room to watch on MTV. This was my powerful introduction to both King and Clapton. I eagerly bought their CD.

It was well past time the two longtime friends teamed up on an album. “I admire the man,” King said of Clapton. “I think he’s No. 1 in rock ‘n’ roll as a guitarist and No. 1 as a great person.” Here was King — a black man born in 1925 on a Mississippi plantation who had experienced real, Jim Crow racism — calling Clapton “No. 1 as a great person.” Yet, in attacks such as the one recently leveled by Los Angeles Times contributor Virginia Heffernan, blasting Clapton for supposedly being an “anti-vaxxer,” he’s been viciously accused of being “racist.”