The quarantine made me reevaluate the role of musicology in the world. With the recent Black Lives Matter protests, I began to reflect more on the role of musicology in the BLM movement, social and racial justice, and how the BLM movement will change the course of musicology. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive account of all the aspects and instances of racism against black lives in musicology and academia. But it is one way I try to process the immense and pervasive systems of oppression that are still in place in the United States. 

Both the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology released statements of solidarity in response to the BLM movement. These statements, like many others, also promised to commit to reflecting on and dismantling the structures of systemic racism within the respective societies. These statements point towards a positive direction for the field of musicology, but also remind us that there is still a long way to go, and a lot to do. 

Many of the aspects of systemic racism are prevalent in the United States academic culture in general. Most recently, Joy Melody Woods and Shardé M. Davis shared their experiences as black scholars through the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory. Many others also started to use the hashtag to share their stories, which included instances where affirmative action was used to question their academic abilities, or where they were accused of stealing from their own faculty mailbox because they didn’t “look like a professor.” Instances like these are prevalent in the experiences of many black academics. And often, being a black academic who speaks up about racism is an often dangerous and thankless job, as detailed by George Yancy. 

The intersections of being a scholar who is black, a woman, and/or identify as LGBTQ+, can also be dangerous, especially if that scholar has an online/public presence. Such reflections on intersectionality comes from reading an op-ed from 2014 in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, and the responses that followed. In short, Kristof laments the lack of public engagement by professors and academics, and the complicated and specialist language of academic papers, often unintelligible to the general public. 

Among the many critiques from academics who are very much engaged with the public, the greatest critique of Kristof is that he is writing from his ivory tower, the same ivory tower in Joy Melody Woods’ #blackintheivory. According to Tressie McMillan Cottom, when Kristof wrote about public intellectuals, “Kristof did not mean professors like me. He did not mean social scientists and artists and humanities professors or scholars of color or queer scholars or really anyone who isn’t an economist from Yale, Harvard and Princeton. When people like Nick Kristof are asking academics to engage in public they generally mean for traditionally erudite scholars — white, western, male, elite — to engage in refining the margins of orthodoxy on a subject.” According to Corey Robin, Kristof’s view from “30,000 feet above sea level” prevents him from seeing the many graduate students and recent graduates who have been very active on social media and other outlets, writing articles on many websites, and their own blogs. But one of Kristof’s criticisms, it seems, is that anything that is not published in the New York Times does not count as public engagement.

The main problem with Kristof’s op-ed isn’t his argument that there needs to be more public intellectuals, but the fact that the basis of his argument, the point of view from which he wrote (as both white and male), excluded many of the academics who are engaged with the public via blogs, social media, etc, academics who identify as women, BIPOC, and/or LGBTQ+. Kristof’s op-ed also does not acknowledge the difficulties that can prevent many of the aforementioned scholars from actively engaging the public. Gwendolyn Beetham, Syreeta McFadden, and Tressie McMillan Cottom all write about the danger of public engagement for scholars of the aforementioned groups, i.e. where those scholars are often threatened with violence and called racial/gendered slurs. Corey Robin also reminds him that for many scholars, worries such as “paying the rent” take precedence. To sum it up, Kristof’s op-ed show who often gets left out in conversations about academia. 

Finally, to cite a music studies-specific example, here is an “open-letter” from Danielle Brown. Brown describes her “dissatisfaction with academia in general, and ethnomusicology in particular.” One of the most significant points that Brown makes is this: 

“This means that white members of the society and in the field at large need to come to terms with how they contribute to systemic racism and do something about it. I can assure you that statements, lists of resources, curriculum guides, roundtables, panel discussions and so forth will not put a dent in the system. They might change individual minds and hearts and make people feel better, but I repeat they will not put a dent in the system. All they will do is redesign the system and create another economy within the system that benefits white people.

Does this mean that those who spent decades studying a culture have no right to teach and write? Not necessarily, but changing the system does mean that people of color must be at the forefront of telling their stories until some sort of equity is reached.”

I definitely recommend reading the whole letter to understand the systemic nature of racism in the field of musicology and ethnomusicology. Most importantly, Brown reminds me that it is important for people of color to tell our own stories, or else others will.

Kristof’s article and the responses are from 6 years ago. The BLM protests, #BlackInTheIvory, and Danielle Brown’s open-letter remind us that systemic racism, along with the elitism and gatekeeping, still exists within academia. And so this blog is part of my ongoing reflection on racism as it manifests in different forms in different places, on the instances of racism that I have not experienced because I am not black, and the ones I have experienced because I am Asian. I am grateful for the many people, past and present, who have sacrificed their time, effort, blood and tears to share their experiences and fight the long fight for social and racial justice. In light of their continuous (but not tireless) effort, I hope to continue to learn from them, to be able to understand the tools that are available to me and the role that I can play in building an equitable and just future.