In my last semester of doctoral coursework at NYU, I took a class called Research On Urban And Minority Education, taught by Alex Freidus. For my final paper, I wrote about the racial politics of music education. I had written versions of this paper for other courses, but Alex supplied some key concepts and vocabulary I had been missing, and I felt like this was the first time I had really been able to get my arms around my core idea: that school music is a site where white privilege is reproduced. On May 8, I posted the paper on this blog, as I have with all of my grad school writing assignments. I got some gratifying rah-rah responses from other progressive music educators, with more Facebook and Twitter shares than usual, and that felt good.
I also got one strange comment:
The most interesting thing about this article is that it requires the reader to be familiar (and in agreement) with a very specific ideology (postmodernist relativism) in order to be understood according to the author’s intentions. To a normal educated person, the content of this article reads as shockingly racist, and deeply morally confused. In order for it to sound somewhat palatable, and not like the incredibly racist screed that it is, the author has had to torturously render the entire thing using a strict postmodernist vocabulary.
I’m used to cultural conservatives calling me racist for talking about racism. But I wasn’t sure why this guy was harping on the word “postmodernist.” It’s an accurate description of my scholarly approach, but it also describes every other mainstream academic in the world. It would be like disparaging me by calling me an American. This is before I found out that “postmodernism” is a Jordan Peterson buzzword.
Then, a couple of weeks later, the real excitement began.
Continue reading “My adventures among the alt-right”
