The racial politics of music education

In the face of ongoing protests against police brutality in the US, I’m seeing some music educators fretting about the relevance of their work. I believe that Eurocentric music education can validate and perpetuate white supremacy, and that our responsibility is to dismantle it. Here’s an excerpt of my dissertation in progress. I hope you find it useful or thought-provoking.

Theoretical Framework: Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (CRT) is a form of critical theory that views social and political issues through the frame of race (Crenshaw, et al., 1996). CRT is premised on two central beliefs: that race is socially constructed, and that racism is deeply and broadly enmeshed within American society. “In research, the use of CRT methodology means that the researcher foregrounds race and racism in all aspects of the research process; challenges the traditional research paradigms, texts, and theories used to explain the experiences of people of color; and offers transformative solutions to racial, gender, and class subordination in our societal and institutional structures” (Creswell, 2007, p. 28). The story of American popular music is inextricable from its racial conflicts, and nowhere are these conflicts more acute than in hip-hop.

Afrological and Eurological

In casual discussions of the racial aspects of American music, I often use “white music” and “black music” as an admittedly oversimplified shorthand. In this dissertation, I will instead adopt Lewis’ (1996) terms ”Afrological” and ”Eurological,” describing musical systems that evolved in and are historically characteristic of black and white cultural environments, respectively. Nearly all major movements in American popular music have been Afrological in origin. Classical music is largely Eurological in origin, and its American proponents continue to hold to European-descended epistemologies, in which music belongs to a “realm of pure abstraction” (Scruton, 1999, p. 489) that transcends the body. Even when school music programs include Afrological musics in the repertoire or curriculum, they present them within a Eurological context, holding students to the norms of white bodily comportment, “an embodied ideal of cultural nobility” (Gustafson, 2008, p. 267). Hip-hop is embodied, kinetic, and affective, and it is the most Afrological musical form to be found in the American cultural mainstream. It therefore conflicts directly with the demands of white bodily comportment.

Racism without Racists

Music teachers are more likely than their students to be white, and to come from suburban, low-poverty areas (Doyle, 2014). Participants in elective school music classes and ensembles have a similar demographic profile—privileged groups are overrepresented in terms of race, socioeconomic status, English fluency, and parents’ education level (Elpus & Abril, 2011). These demographics combine with the Eurocentric traditions of university-level music education to create an environment hostile to black vernacular musics. As a result, hip-hop artists and fans are alienated from formal music education spaces, and vice versa. My three participants have each expressed some variety of this alienation, and I plan to explore it intensively in interviews.

White music educators need not to be hateful or racist to preserve white privilege. Passivity and conflict aversion are sufficient (Castagno, 2014). “Racism without racists” nevertheless has real social consequences. For example, while discrimination in the criminal justice system is nominally illegal, there are nevertheless wide racial disparities in America’s incarceration rates (Alexander, 2012). Music “explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code” (Attali, 1985, p. 11). By presenting a more heterogeneous and less hegemonic curriculum, music educators may be able to model a more equitable society.

Epistemological Colonialism and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge

Setting and prioritizing educational goals is a political act (Labaree, 1997). Every tradition requires selectivity, the preservation of some meanings and practices and the neglect or concealment of others (Apple, 1979). It is distressing, therefore, that a substantial number of music educators and critics believe that rap is not music at all, or that it is severely musically deficient. For example, Bayles (2004) describes hip-hop’s “marginalization of melody” as having moved popular music “from a music based on shapely melody and sophisticated harmony to one based on mere squiggles”, and that “listeners of all colors are the poorer for it” (pp. 84-85). These beliefs may not have overt racial motivations, but they nevertheless function as ”epistemological colonialism” (Bradley, 2012), and they join a long history of dismissive attitudes among educators toward black, immigrant, or Native American musics (Gustafson, 2008). The concept of “highbrow” art is itself a holdover from white supremacist ideology, a term meant to distinguish Anglo-Saxons from “lowbrowed” nonwhite immigrants (Peterson & Kern, 1996). In the United States, it is impossible to disentangle the politics of the cultural canon from the politics of race.

What are the Racial Politics of Music Education?

I will use the lens of critical race theory to examine the racialized dimensions of hip-hop’s marginalization within formal music education. This marginalization goes far beyond the presence or absence of particular works or artists in curricula or performance programs.

The term ”American popular music” is substantially “a euphemism for Afro-American popular musics” (Feld, 1988, p. 31). Western musical “high culture” has a long history of defining itself in opposition to “Other” of African music (Agawu, 2003, p. 206). As Europeans of the nineteenth century developed a more rationalized understanding of their art music, they contrasted it to the “pre-discursive,” “natural” musical practices of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993). America’s “high” musical culture has followed Europe’s lead in maintaining a polar opposition between ”popular” and ”elite”, with popular equated to both “low” and “black” (Middleton, 2000, p. 60). The conflict  between “high” and “low” cultures therefore has an inescapably racialized dimension.

Expanding the canon to include a greater diversity of musics would appear to be a worthwhile goal for progressive educators. However, in doing so, we will fail to challenge the basic fact of the canon’s existence and its role in academic culture. “[T]he canon is an epistemology; it is a way of understanding the world that privileges certain aesthetic criteria and that organizes a narrative about the history and development of music around such criteria and based on that understanding of the world. In other words, the canon is an ideology more than a specific repertory” (Madrid, 2017, p. 125). Diversity is of no help if we simply use it to perpetuate and legitimize underlying privilege and power inequalities. By contrast, a critical examination of racial issues in music education has the potential to transform the field.

Racial Hierarchy and Authority

Educational institutions are major agencies of transmission of an effective dominant culture. Every tradition is an act of selectivity, a process of choosing to preserve and present some meanings and practices and neglecting or concealing others. Within the meanings that comprise a tradition, “some of these meanings are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture” (Apple, 1979, p. 5). When cultural authorities educators issue blanket condemnations or dismissals of hip-hop, they are not just stating an aesthetic preference; they are reasserting political dominance.

Outspoken condemnations of rap by the likes of Ben Shapiro has become uncommon. Dismissal of rap and other black musics more often takes the form of exnomination, exclusion by omission. The terms “new music,” “contemporary music” and “art music” are examples of such exnomination. A more subtle example can be found in Todd (2016), a music appreciation textbook that presents African-American music among its coverage of “non-Western” traditions. “[T]he message conveyed is that the reasons for the exclusion—namely the intrinsic unworthiness of that which is excluded—are so obvious, so self-evident, that they need not even be stated” (Sarath, Myers & Campbell, 2016, pp. 121-122, emphasis in original).  Such passive neglect and exclusion of black music is far more common in education circles than outspoken hostility or contempt.

White music educators of the present day do not need to personally harbor racist beliefs in order to benefit from the centering of their culture in the curriculum. “Whiteness maintains power and privilege by perpetuating and legitimating the status quo while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of neutrality, equality, and compassion” (Castagno, 2014, p. 5). To preserve white privilege, it is not necessary to be hateful; passivity and conflict aversion are sufficient. White people are inclined to see racism as an individual character flaw, rather than a systemic issue. As a result, “whites are usually more receptive to validating white racism if that racism is constructed as residing in individual white people other than themselves” (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 61). It is easier to condemn individual bad actors than to recognize one’s own complicity in a racist system.

Racists of the Jim Crow era argued that black people are biologically and morally inferior. White people in the present are less likely to openly espouse such beliefs. Nevertheless, they may continue to covertly hold them, cloaking them in more socially acceptable guises like a condemnation of the supposed “culture of poverty,” or advocacy for ”meritocracy” over affirmative action (Bonilla-Silva, 2013). Many white people are insulated from the racist consequences of such beliefs due to simple ignorance. “[M]embers of the dominant group in any society do not necessarily have to know anything about those people who are not like them… This privileged isolation is not a luxury available to people who live outside of dominance and must, for their survival, understand the essential social nuances of those in power” (Howard, 2006, pp. 14-15). Because hip-hop gives voice to poor and working class black people and other marginalized groups, it presents opportunities for educators to guide white listeners into difficult conversations about their own biases and blind spots.

Racial ideology can have profound real-world consequences. The United States has the dubious distinction of imprisoning more of its population than any other country in the world, and it incarcerates racial minorities far in excess of their percentage of the population. “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid” (Alexander, 2012, p. 6). When white Americans see the racial disparities in the prison population, it confirms their existing biases about “those people,” which in turn increases their support for harsher punishments (Nellis, 2016, p. 11). The equation of blackness with criminality is so strong that a white job applicant who discloses a felony drug conviction is more likely to get a callback than a black applicant with no criminal record at all (Pager, 2007). We can not address such implicit and unstated racial biases without addressing their cultural foundation. Eurocentric music education is part of a larger cultural ecosystem that favors the flourishing of such bias.

Teaching Whiteness in American Music Education

Music teachers in the United States are more likely than their students to be white, and to come from suburban, low-poverty areas (Doyle, 2014). Participants in elective music classes and ensembles have a similar demographic profile—privileged groups are overrepresented, in terms of race, socioeconomic status, English fluency, and parents’ education level (Elpus & Abril, 2011). This is true even in schools that supply free instruments, suggesting that wealth disparities alone can not explain the lopsidedly white and privileged face of school ensembles. University music education programs emphasize European-descended classical tradition over all other forms of musical competency. A study of the undergraduate music education program at a large university found that students spent 93% of course time on Western art musics, as opposed to 0.5% of course time on all forms of popular music, and even less on non-Western traditions (Wang & Humphries, 2009, p. 25). The hegemonic whiteness of music educators’ own training poses a central challenge to adopting hip-hop in the classroom.

The present-day opposition between “official” music and “popular” music has not always existed. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of what we now group under the heading of ”classical” music was experienced as ”popular,” including opera and brass bands. Before the middle of the twentieth century, music educators worked to foster broad-based lifelong amateur participation (Kratus, in press). Why, then, do American schools no longer teach music that is popular? Humphries (2004) points to several historical causes:

• Educators’ desire to reform mass tastes rather than to follow them;
• Cultural bias, particularly teachers’ widespread discomfort with youth culture;
• Institutional preferences for teaching cognitively-oriented “art“ music over affectively-oriented social dance music;
• The conservative tendencies of local control;
• The role that classical music has taken on as a marker of upward class mobility.

Whatever the reasons, music educators are typically more interested in elevating students’ tastes than in validating them.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to broaden students’ horizons. However, doing so can have unintended consequences for students’ sense of their own musicality. It is a truism of music education advocacy that playing an instrument builds a child’s self-confidence (e.g. NAfME, 2014), but music education experiences can just as easily undermine that self-confidence by making students feel incompetent and unmusical (Ruddock & Leong, 2005). “It is in relation to the dominant school-based genre that pupils form judgements of musical worth, have musical encounters and ultimately decide if the understanding of ‘musician’ presented in the school context relates to their own understanding of themselves” (Saunders, 2010, p. 74). If music teachers neglect or denigrate some forms of musicality, then they create the sense that those forms do not count as musicality at all.

While few people participate in orchestras or marching bands outside of school, educators retain “ideological power that is disproportionate to the number of people engaged in their species of musical activity” (Cavicchi, 2009, p. 101). Thus it is possible for a friend of mine to lament that he “stopped playing music” when he gave up classical flute in school, only to tell me a moment later that he sings carols and plays Latin percussion with his family every Christmas (Elbert Garcia, personal communication, March 2015). School music is not the only vector for music education—for example, Bell (2016) makes clear that as a “high school music dropout,” he ”quit school music, not music” (p. 243, emphasis in original). Still, the stigma of official “failure” is a heavy psychological burden to carry. Too many would-be amateur musicians are unwilling or unable to shrug off this burden. By showing recognition to students’ musical identities, educators could potentially attract many more young people to participate.

White Cultural Hegemony

A core tenet of institutionalized whiteness is the supposed objectivity and universality of its perspective. This belief couples with the widespread belief among white people that they live outside of culture, enabling them to view themselves as “universal humans who can represent all of human experience” (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 59). European-descended music pedagogy is no exception, cloaking itself in the language of “objectivity, transparency, universality, rationality, necessity, teleology, and the finality (the irreducibility) of (its) origins and ends” (Finn, 1997, p. 74). As a result, music textbooks commonly describe canonical masterpieces as “universal, timeless, and valid under all circumstances. This music is not one solution or one aspect, nor is it a personal matter; it speaks to all peoples” (Lang, 1997 (1952), p. 38). By the same logic, education in the Western canon must have universal applicability: “[T]raining in functional harmony and voice leading establishes a basis for understanding music that can serve as a foundation for the study of virtually any musical style, western or non-western” (Gagné, 1994, p. 23). However, the popularity of rap with white listeners is evidence that the norms of the Western canon are not even universal among European-descended Americans, much less globally. Hip-hop pedagogy therefore has the potential to stimulate long-overdue challenges to curricular Eurocentrism.

Musical value judgments are neither objective nor politically neutral. Music education has a history of defining musical excellence to uplift European cultural norms and to disparage or demean other groups. This history dates to the nineteenth century, when Western culture was the hegemonic cornerstone of American education. “Cultural uniformity was accepted without question, and the dissenting voices of women and minorities were more or less silent. Notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful could be described with relative surety” (Jorgensen, 2003, p. 2). Music education was no exception to this hegemony, presenting the European classical canon as humanity’s most sublime artistic achievement.

The educational mainstream has come to embrace multiculturalism, and the merits of the Western canon are now subject to debate. Nevertheless, well-meaning educators unwittingly preserve epistemological colonialism when they embrace “exoticism through token inclusion; superficial celebration of diversity; fear of diversity combined with its exploitation as commodity; and the celebration of hybridity” (Bradley, 2012, p. 427). Discourse around hip-hop in the United States “replays in many ways those reports by colonial officials in the nineteenth century on the primitive customs of unruly natives” (Brennan, 2001, pp. 51-52). Educators who wish to let hip-hop inform their practice must be careful not to colonize or appropriate it instead. This is particularly challenging for white-identified educators like Martin Urbach and myself. It is a primary research question of mine to examine how white educators can embrace hip-hop without perpetuating colonialism.

Stereotype Threat

When music curricula present canonical musics as intrinsically more valid than students’ preferred musics, the negative consequences can go beyond boredom or disengagement. Educators may unwittingly “challenge the legitimacy of their students’ deeply felt musical experiences and therefore—whether they intend to or not—begin from the position of a threat” (Cavicchi, 2009, p. 100). This threat is most acute when students identify as belonging to marginalized groups. Delpit (2013) defines “stereotype threat” as “the experience of anxiety or concern in a situation where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about the social group to which they belong” (p. 17). Such anxiety is antithetical to a supportive learning environment.

Most popular musicians, myself included, have felt some version of invalidation in music classrooms. Those of us who persist were usually inspired by a teacher or mentor who made us feel “seen” and valued. Toni Blackman cites a college professor who introduced her to the free jazz movement, which she describes as “fascinating my music nerd self no end” (Ableton, 2019). Brandon Bennett also cites a college jazz educator who encouraged him to improvise on piano as a method of creative exploration (personal communication, February 2019). These experiences echo my own positive experience of college-level jazz study. While jazz does not form the core of any of our adult musical selves, it at least offered us enough freedom to make space for the nurturance of those selves. It is a primary motivator of this project to determine whether hip-hop might play a similar role for younger students.

What is hip-hop education?

Hip-hop is not (only) a music genre; it is a worldview (Petchauer, 2011). Hip-hop education is a specialized version of culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2015). Such pedagogy uses “the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant to and effective for them” (Gay, 2000, p. 29). Villegas and Lucas (2002) identified six characteristic traits of culturally responsive teachers: 1) sociocultural consciousness, a recognition that our perceptions are influenced by our social identities; 2) seeing students’ diverse backgrounds as resources for learning rather than deficits to be overcome;  3) a sense of responsibility for bringing about educational change; 4) an understanding of how students construct knowledge, and how to foster that construction; 5) knowledge about students’ lives; and 6) the ability to deliver instruction that builds on students’ existing knowledge while “stretching them beyond the familiar” (p. 21). Cultural responsiveness has potentially transformative implications for music education, since it runs directly counter to the canon-centric traditions of the field.

Definitions of Hip-Hop Pedagogy

Adjapong and Emdin (2015) define hip-hop pedagogy as “a way of authentically and practically incorporating the creative elements of Hip-Hop into teaching, and inviting students to have a connection with the content while meeting them on their cultural turf by teaching to, and through their realities and experiences” (p. 67). They advocate for hip-hop pedagogy in a context seemingly far removed from music, namely, science class. In this case, hip-hop informs the teaching practice, not the course content. For example, the authors describe a “call and response” structure for teacher-student interactions, modeled on the way an emcee or DJ hypes up a crowd and invites audience participation.

The hip-hop educators in my study have values that align with a praxial philosophy of music education. This philosophy is premised on the belief that responsible, educative teaching prioritizes caretaking of students above all other pedagogical considerations. Educative teaching consists of “active reflection and critically reflective action dedicated to supporting and advancing human flourishing and well-being, the ethical care of others, and the positive transformation of people’s everyday lives” (Elliott & Silverman, 2015, p. 52). Praxial music education conceives of music as a social activity, one that exists in social, cultural and ethical contexts. A social praxis like music is an opportunity to develop virtue, but doing so is only possible under an ethos of care.

Formal music education could too often be more accurately described as training (Green, 2002, p. 128). If music only consisted of technical procedures, then it would perhaps be acceptable for educators to train students on “purely musical” matters, and not to worry about social or ethical concerns. However, a praxial philosophy requires us to recognize that music is intrinsically social, and that educators therefore have a responsibility to recognize this social aspect and its attendant ethical implications. Music, for praxialists, is more than just a pleasure technology, a form of “auditory cheesecake” (Pinker, 1994). Instead, it exists “within the broader ethical context of human development and well-being—as a fundamental, empathic, and embodied sense-making capacity that plays a central role in how we enact the personal and socio-cultural worlds we inhabit” (van der Schyff, et al, 2016, p. 83). Music education can therefore never be limited to “purely musical” considerations. Social, cultural and political considerations are especially critical for the study of hip-hop, but they should also play a role in the study of any music.

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