A Curious Feeling.
What a curious feeling it is to teach at a University whose campus your grandparents wouldn’t ever have been able to set foot on. To know you are a descendant of Eunice Liberty, a disciple of Mary Mcleod Bethune, whose efforts to include African American history in Dade County schools serve as acts that may have altered your own Black students’ hailing from south Florida’s understanding of themselves.To know the recital hall in which you lecture was the site of your mother’s Baroque music history class as an undergraduate, during a time where most professors didn’t care about the personal lives and struggles of their Black students. It is a curious feeling to know you are mastering the craft of teaching, a craft you inherited from them and those who were denied access to this space that negates your experience each day. What kind of scholar can emerge from that kind of learning situation?
Pictured Above: My paternal Grandparents, Educators and graduates of FAMU
I had a very difficult conversation with a colleague of mine this week about the violent protection of silence and comfort. It crushed me to my core. I had to call out the flawed logic of protecting their job prospects in lieu of speaking up for what they deeply proclaim in private. And I mean literally in private, in back hallways and offices, hushed away. What does it mean to witness the pain of Black educators, ensemble directors, musicians; to comfort them in their many experiences of micro-aggressions and to fail to address these issues publicly; to hide your activism and solidarity behind the papers, articles, chapters, and textbooks that remain unwritten? I shouldn’t have to ask these questions as an educator or a colleague. What’s worse is that it took a pandemic for me to realize how the culture of my University, my College and my departmental Area were poisoning me to believe not only that I had to, but also it was my privilege.
“Music has long been a vehicle that brings people together, lifting us up in spirit and resolve. Let us use our strong voice and powerful community to speak out about what is right, and to take action in valuing the lives of those who face prejudice and oppression.”
I want to speak about voices and music. Voices sound in all manner of timbre, tone, and volume. I write about them, I think about them, and teach about them a lot. I play the voices of my ancestors for classes. And I talk about how my family’s experience as Black Americans grants me the unique positionality that I have as a Black woman educator at that institution. Some of the most sincere and well-meaning white and non-Black POC voices do the most harm there. I got so good at recognizing them too, the dissonance in quiet micro-aggressions or loud silences. I know because I’ve heard it, and recorded it. I recalled those voicing racist hurt and pain in my Master’s thesis. I even had to silence my own voice... well, I had to remix it, for my own protection. I mean I filtered my voice. l spliced it in two. I compressed my voice, working in the right shade of equalizer to cloak the echo and reverb that causes its presence to linger. I did all this just to sound my voice in the lonely space of a page. I toned it down, so that my voice could be softer in its severity. I wrote my voice that way to prove I was able to dispassionately remove myself from my pain. Just as I was advised to by my professor. When I decided to silence myself, I was presented with the solution. I wrote my own voice out of my document in order to protect an institution of higher learning that failed to safeguard my well-being, my mental health, and my physical health at every turn.
So when I talk about the voice and voices – acts of hearing, listening, and sounding them –I warn the students who enroll in my classes to brace themselves for dissonance. I train my students to know that our voices won’t always resolve into a post-racial consonance. In fact, if you are listening to it just right you may vibrate, catching all the metaphysical oppression sounded simultaneously both in historic and contemporary events. Those voices bump up against the grain of the simple melody, never quite blending into simple four part harmonies. I play Eric Whitacre’s arrangement of the “Star Spangled Banner” to illustrate sonically to them that we won’t always agree. It is a moment of terrifying pleasure, to expose my students to intentional dissonance by using music to unlock the possibilities of sounding the haunting of U.S. American history. This intervention is born out of a love and reverence for their minds and world views. I vow to use the space of my classroom for wrestling with perspectives that challenge the ideas that miseducate us into comfort.
I invite them to imagine what our national anthem might sound like if everyone were allowed to voice their own lived experiences and those voices of the ancestors, the fictive kin that are passed down through diasporic legacies. As my dad once said to me, “Let’s not judge each other; let’s try to understand each other, but judge yourself.” But when you are Black this “understanding” of each other means two things at once: 1) To walk the tightrope of knowledge about white people, and white adjacent POC, who have little to no racial consciousness, competency, or empathy; 2) To boldly proclaim the painfully beautiful and righteous rage inherent to existing while Black. How to do this in a predominantly white institution in the South? How to do this?
I am critical of spaces in which I learn and teach because I was lulled into false sense of security when I arrived for my graduate school interview. Apparently, I knocked it out of the park, even through the awkward stares of a white woman applicant. The whole day, she peered at me with this cold stare that asked what was my place here, in her presence, in her memory. And that last bit made it all click, her memory. She said “You remind me of Poussey.” You know, the petite Black woman shown gasping for breath during a demonstration of resistance. Right? She was murdered by a white prison guard in Orange is the New Black. That was sign number one that my place as a student and instructor would be filled with instances of absolute terror. So I mindfully engage with that feeling in the class. Terror. My educational efforts begin with a lecture about minstrelsy, introducing to hundreds of white and non-Black POC the modern-day Blackface and redface that are performed often in popular music. I do the labor of soothing these students’ guilt, reminding them that it is ok to the criticize something, someone, somebody that you love.
“We still gotta have each other enough to be able to say, ‘I love you enough to tell you the truth.’ And that is a radical act of love, to tell you the truth in such a way that invites you to know the truth.”
I want to talk about learning music and racism. My first experiences of racism in the music classroom as an educator began in Virginia Beach. I worked with a white woman music teacher. I’ll call her Aria. Aria hid behind her disability to make a racist comment about a Black autistic girl in our classes. Aria said, “And I can say this because I have ADHD. But Destiny, she’s just dumb. Like she’s just dumb, she can’t learn anything.” I felt the irony of a white woman named after a revered Western European art music genre harboring such violent feelings towards her students. I write this knowing she believed those racist and ableist feelings exist independent of her pedagogy, but I know that these sentiments are transferred into her teaching practice. I remember having to educate my supervising teacher on why she should see color after complaining about having to do diversity training. A few days later she mentioned the possibility of calling the resource officer on a 9-year-old Black girl who was having a tantrum. To make matters worse, she had previously told me that her teaching mission is to prepare her students for the real world. I took the time then to educate her but I never knew if she actually heard me. These are but two micro-aggressions.
So when I go hard about teaching racial and cultural competency using music, these are the experiences that resound in my words. They are tucked in along with the many I’ve accumulated over the past few years on this journey of earning my doctorate in musicology. The stories from Black women in music education, performance, musicology, and composition about hearing their non-Black friends and colleagues say “Nigga... nigger” sneak their way into my speech. These instances resonate with those silences and empty gestures I’ve received from friends and educators in the music community. They are extra loud. Fortissississmo, if you will. So when I call you (read: White and non-Black POC music professionals) in, that is more my speed. Keep in mind to listen deeply to all the racist musical experiences that I carry on my tongue, be able to discern them as you hear my words in typeface. Don’t trip yourself up over the grammatical errors in my budding language, as it contorts itself to describe the horror and frustration that my Black colleagues live with in our bodies, minds and spirits. I’ll learn to correct it later; the time is too pressing. For you to mishear me now means that you’ve been failed by every music theory, band, choir, orchestra and history teacher from which you’ve had privilege to learn.
