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I have just finished listening online to an engaging report by The New Yorker Radio Hour on race relations, titled, “Who Gets to Be Italian?” It’s about being born black in Italy, and the inevitable legal and racist barriers to full rights and acceptance in Il Bel Paese.
The segment moved along briskly telling its story of a people who–living in a country at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Sea and all with the genetic cross-pollination that has accompanied it for millennia–have nevertheless come to believe that they carry with them some sort of pure bloodline that, given its purity, prevents black people born in the country from automatic or easy access to citizenship.
But that’s not what really caught my attention. For all the careful crafting of the story by the producer, a black American born of African parents, somehow, at the point when he was discussing America’s Harlem Renaissance and the role of cultural acceptance, the musical background cued up was… George Gershwin and his, “An American in Paris.”
Really? Am I to believe that there was no available music cue from, oh, let’s just pick a few black musicians who were associated with that era, say, Duke Ellington? Jimmy Lunceford? Count Basie? Fats Waller?
This is something–the automatic use of white made creative music–that, even as a white male, has gotten my goat for a long time; but its never been as noticeable as in the aftermath of the recent series of homicides against black US citizens by white perpetrators and the ensuing widespread recognition among whites that something is terribly wrong and needs urgent fixing.
And while at first glance music selection might seem a trivial complaint, I think it gets to an important truth about the distance that still needs to be traveled to reach actual racial equality.
That’s because, in my view, white culture still has a heavy superiority complex. Do you want to convey a sense of cultural gravitas? Cue up a dead white composer. Facing a declining listenership to your classical music radio station? Well, just overload your already dying off listeners with more Mozart, Beethoven and Shubert! After all, it’s “high art,” isn’t it?
Yes, it is. But not only is it not the only form of musical high art, but in America we have our very own, home grown form of it. For those who might still be guessing, it’s called jazz, and it has a pure form dating back a good Century, and numerous offshoots. And there are plenty of styles that, notwithstanding the initial shock of the “new,” would gain rapid appreciation among us listeners; not all, for sure, but we’re out there.
That, at least, is my supposition. I could be wrong. Perhaps our cultural institutions have surveyed their landscape and found that any deviation from a format that exalts white music and ignores black music of creativity is a turnoff to the certainties of superiority held tightly by its patrons.
Now, there have been tentative efforts. For one, I can recall the music programmer Terrance McKnight occasionally mixing in some actual American music when he hosted a program on New York Public Radio affiliate WNYC. But then that station went all-news and McKnight moved over to sister-station WQXR, and I have pretty much lost touch with whether he still is trying to sneak in something different, or if he’s even allow to.
And, in the wake of the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, the classical performance program, Performance Today, via its host, Fred Child, has been offering up the work of black composers and performers at the beginning of several broadcasts I’ve heard. Whether that will continue is unknown to me.
One consistent exception is Columbia University-based WKCR, which has such an eclectic mix of genres, eras and styles that it goes far beyond anything imaginable on a wider scale. But how many people are within its broadcast range, or know to pick it up streaming on the Internet?
If real change is going to happen, stations, programmers, orchestras, ensembles, record labels, and listeners will need to get over their white cultural superiority complex, and open their ears anew. It would be one sign that the age of true racial equality is finally arriving.