Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection
144
Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253038425 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2018 |
| Series: | Activist Encounters in Folklore and Ethnomusicology |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BLACK MIZZOU: MUSIC AND STORIES ONE YEAR LATER
Stephanie Shonekan
An October evening in the fall of 2016 felt like déjà vu. The multipurpose room of the Gaines-Oldham Black Culture Center at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) was packed. The mood was somber. Black student leaders had called an emergency town hall meeting. The night before, some black students had been called the N-word and misogynistic expletives by a group of white students standing outside the entrance to their fraternity house. It felt like déjà vu because almost exactly one year earlier, Payton Head, the student body president, who happens to be African American, as well as a group of students of the Legion of Black Collegians had been called the N-word all in the span of one week. Given the power of language and the value of semiotics, it was no surprise that the one word triggered a series of events — a hunger strike, a series of protests and marches, the Mizzou football players' boycott, two powerful administrators stepping down, and a stream of threats toward the lives of black folks by way of a social network app, Yik Yak. To say that this was a major crisis would be an understatement as the university served as the epicenter for protests on many campuses across the country.
The question on all our minds at the town hall meeting that October evening was whether anything had changed. Since the events of the previous year, the university had worked hard to push for change — working with a widening circle of institutional and individual allies, creating a diversity program for incoming freshmen, installing diversity requirements across colleges and schools, and hosting a stream of speakers like the author and legal expert Bryan Stevenson (whose work Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption was published in 2014); the activist Diane Nash, who had marched with King in Selma; and many others. These new responses to a continuing practice of "old-school" racism were a reminder that we had simply scratched the surface of a big and wide system of oppression that has been built over hundreds of years. In other words, what happened on the Mizzou campus was a new episode in a continuum of racism that has been evolving since slavery, and in response, every generation has produced a mode of black liberation.
I contend that at the heart of every black liberation movement in the United States, there is the accompanying sound of black music that serves as a soundtrack for each wave of the movement. During the civil rights movement, as King and Lewis were engaged in a 1960s precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and the Staple Singers performed songs that spoke directly to the work of the activists. Music accompanied the marches and sit-ins. Examining the impact of soul music in the 1960s, the ethnomusicologist Portia Maultsby reveals that "performers of soul music, in communicating the philosophy of the Black Power Movement, promoted the black pride or self-awareness concept" (1989, 168). This notion has reappeared in the evolution of the music through the decades. This chapter acknowledges the link between black struggle and black music by examining the multiple ways that music was involved during and after the Mizzou movement. Like all the other movements that have been instigated by black folks around the world over the years, the movement on Mizzou's campus was suffused with music on every level and in every space.
As a scholar of black studies and ethnomusicology on the Mizzou campus, who had access to the students and their movement, I found myself considering the ways in which music featured for the collective, for individuals, and for the institution. I was interested in song choices for different individuals and for unique situations. Soul music and gospel music dominated the 1960s movement because those were the genres that had emerged at that time from an amalgamation of sacred and secular African American oral traditions. In the 2000s, that music has evolved to new genres rooted in the same common foundations. Thus, the music that serves this generation is new black music, and new black civil rights music. Like other activists before them, these students turned to the music of their generation for inspiration, motivation, and spiritual upliftment.
The Context/The Movement
In November 2015, a group of University of Missouri students led a powerful movement that shook the very foundations of the university. This movement of young black student activists finally grew tired of the racist environment in which they had to study. They spoke up and stood up with the ultimate goal of overturning the status quo. The product of that movement resulted in the resignations of the president and chancellor, an investigation of the curriculum, the establishment of unprecedented coalitions and caucuses, and the exposure of both openly practicing racists and passive racism in the form of microaggressions.
The roots of Mizzou's activism had begun a long time ago in the 1930s and 1940s when black students were not allowed to enroll on campus, to the 2010s, when, for example, cotton balls were strewn on the lawn outside the Gaines-Oldham Black Culture Center. The former example was a consequence of institutionalized racism and Jim Crow in action; and the latter was an action by a few modern-day white students who were intent on sending a message to black students that they were nothing but cotton pickers, a clear reference to the days of slavery. From the 1930s to the present, the scrutiny of student activists was focused not only on the perpetrators of racist acts but also on the ways in which the administration reacted to these acts.
In the case of the cotton balls, the administration chose to acknowledge this as littering and not as a racist occurrence (Heavin 2010). This inaction sent a clear message to the entire student body that the administration was unwilling to engage with the very troubling pattern of racism.
Such scrutiny was resurrected after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and it came to a head in the spring of 2015, when black students once again challenged the administration's silence after the murder of Mike Brown in August 2014 just down the road in Ferguson. Wesley Lowery asserts that "from Ferguson to Mizzou, it was fitting that Missouri played such a crucial role in the nation's reckoning with race and justice" (2016, 214).
Some students began to march peacefully, led by a group called MU for Mike Brown. Another group called Wage Peace led a silent burial procession across campus, holding make-shift coffins symbolizing the young black lives that had been murdered by police and other perpetrators. By this time, the Black Lives Matter movement had become the umbrella under which all these actions were taking place. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor asks, "Is it any wonder that a new movement has taken Black Lives Matter as its slogan when it is so clear that for the police, Black lives do not matter at all?" (2016, 3).
In the fall of 2015, the administration again turned a blind eye and deaf ear to reports of multiple macro- and microaggressions on campus: for instance, the school body president Payton Head and many others were called "nigger" while walking on campus. Reflecting on the viscerally hateful articulation of this deliberate version of the N-word, Head issued a passionate response by way of a Facebook post, which went viral and captured national attention. In response to these new occurrences, a graduate student named Danielle Walker started a campaign called RacismLivesHere. I watched as a small group became bigger, publicly taking over space in the student center and in the administrative building to raise awareness about the trauma that black students and other marginalized groups had been experiencing, and about the ways in which this racist environment obstructs the educational process for them, which white students do not have to contend with.
This call was carried forward into November 2015, when a group of eleven committed students called ConcernedStudent1950 (CS1950), in honor of the first year a black student was admitted to the university, began to carefully organize peaceful action, vibrant protests, and silent marches. Finally, during the homecoming parade, they blocked the car carrying the president of the University of Missouri system, Tim Wolfe. Their intention was to communicate to him the gravity of the situation. When he refused to engage in a conversation with the students, with his car actually nudging forward into the group, members of the wider Columbia community began to taunt the students. The police also stepped in to "protect" the president. As a result of this traumatic experience, Jonathan Butler, a graduate student, embarked on a hunger strike, insisting on the resignation of the president. This inspired the black football players to stop playing or practicing until conditions had been met to allow Butler to end his hunger strike.
When President Wolfe exposed his misunderstanding or miseducation regarding the meaning of systemic racism, the calls for his resignation grew stronger. It was unconscionable, the students and their allies insisted, for the president of a research, land-grant university to blame systemic racism on the very victims of the oppressive historical system. Joined by hundreds of mostly black students, CS1950 continued to march, hold sit-ins and dieins, and set up camp in front of the administration building. They would not move, they said, until Jonathan Butler ate; the football players, backed by their coach, Gary Pinkel, would not play or practice until then; and Butler was adamant that he would not eat until the president resigned. Along with other colleagues, I supported from the sidelines, observing the atmosphere grow tense, as the line between revolution and rebellion became taut. A widening group of faculty and staff began to collect food and resources to feed the students who had joined the camp in the cold fall season. It is widely speculated that the shift came when the administration and the board calculated the millions of dollars at stake if the football players did not play in an upcoming Southeastern Conference game.
This social movement was also a sonorously musical movement. I began to notice the brilliant strains of black music permeating the students' activism. Even though, on a national level, the season was rife with frustrations about the appropriation of black music — with white artists like Iggy Azalea, Adele, Macklemore, and Demi Lovato gaining attention for their co-opting of black musical styles — this position of black music as a significant player in the movement reminded me of the real power of the music as an integral part of black life. While its commercial impact (for black people) seems to be receding, its cultural significance is as powerful as ever, just as scholars from Samuel Floyd, to Amiri Baraka, to Portia Mautlsby have maintained. At Mizzou, music certainly appeared to be a soundtrack for both the collective and the individuals.
The Collective: Music of the Movement
One of the major lessons for me as I watched the events unfold in the fall of 2015 was that theory was becoming reality in the sense that, as a Nigerian-Trinidadian woman born on the other side of the globe in the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, I had only ever read about the ways in which socially conscious songs featured in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In his book Sweet Soul Music, Peter Guralnick traces the evolution of civil rights songs and explains, "Once [soul music] emerged from the underground, it accompanied the Civil Rights Movement almost step by step, its success directly reflecting the giant strides that integration was making" (1986, 2). The Mizzou movement provided a portal into the past, as students organized and marched, galvanized by the songs they sang in unison. New civil rights songs were chanted and sung as students moved from space to space. The chant "silence is violence" was a rhythmic call-and-response, a loud message to those who sat watching from their seats in the student center or memorial union. So many years after the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, these millennials are communicating with the majority of people who look on curiously without participating. Another popular chant was taken from the pages of the Black Panther icon Assata Shakur's autobiography: "It is our duty to fight for our freedom/It is our duty to win/ We must love each other and support each other/We have nothing to lose but our chains" (2001, 52). This chant attested to the urgency that was powerfully exemplified in Butler's hunger strike. As the students marched past the disapproving glares of respectable black folks, offended white folks, and the Thomas Jefferson statue, their collective voices in these chants declared their intent to keep pushing through.
When the chants died down, silence would follow, and then one of the leaders would start a song, something meaningful and motivational. Traditional civil rights staples like "We Shall Overcome" were replaced with new songs such as Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" and the song's hook, "We gon' be alright," which became this generation's modern-day civil rights anthem. Released in July 2015, "Alright" arrived just in time to serve as the anthem for the nationwide movement. The accompanying video for the song was a reflection of the current political and social landscape of the United States. Much of the video is presented like a short documentary film as Lamar places himself above the city, watching from the precarious vantage point of a streetlight. This allows him (and the viewer) to watch the troubling pathological activities of police presence in urban spaces. At the end of the footage, a police officer watches him, aims, and shoots Lamar's character off his pedestal. As his body plummets in slow motion, we are urged to think about the reality that all the officer had to do was aim with his finger, a symbol of the systemic nature of these problems. In addition, we continue to hear and, therefore, consider the irony in the haunting chorus of "We gon' be alright." When Lamar's body lands, the camera zooms in on his face. He smiles at us, signifying a mixture of hope and cynicism in a future for which we must continue to fight. In other words, the artist is dead, but the music, representing the struggle, lives on.
Like "We Shall Overcome," Lamar's "Alright" has an internal focus on motivating those involved in the spiritual and physical dimensions of the movement. His lyrics rise to the occasion, updating the context to reflect contemporary issues with police brutality and the murder of young black people: "And we hate popo, when they kill us dead in the street for sure." As Lamar repeats the refrain, "We gon' be alright," he calls out to his "niggas." This is an interesting detail because when members of the community wrote to the local paper to comment on the story about Payton Head, a number of them expressed their confusion that if "they" use the N-word in their hip hop, why do "they" get offended when it is used by whites? This line of reasoning is problematic at best. When Lamar says "nigga" here, it is different from the word spat out against black folks on campus. The intention behind the word adds to the context for the meaning. Underscoring the nuanced use of the N-word, the ethnomusicologist Cheryl Keyes explains, "When used as a term of endearment among black speakers, 'nigga' is reclaimed, referring to one's buddy, neighborhood friend, and if spoken by a female MC, a male lover. However, the meaning of this term is solely determined by the adjective or possessive that precedes it" (2002, 137). Like so many members of the hip hop generation, Lamar's use of "nigga" signifies community and camaraderie while white racists' use of "nigger" is a throwback to slavery, hatred, and oppression.
As they marched, gathered, and congregated, the students would constantly break into the chorus of the song: "We gon' be alright!" Repeatedly they would sing, shout, chant this refrain. Although the students did not include the N-word in their chants, everybody who knew the song was aware that Lamar uses this word as a punctuation, as a term of endearment and solidarity, directed at those who embrace it as part of their sociocultural identity, which not everyone can claim. At the end of the spring semester, for their annual Black Love Week, the Legion of Black Collegians created a remake video linking the song to the unique Mizzou movement. As the only faculty member asked to participate, I was struck by the passion and commitment that each participant injected into the creative process. The students threw themselves into the process, which allowed them to rephrase and reinterpret Lamar's original piece while not quite changing the lyrics. The student videographers asked each participant to pick a verse or a phrase, look into the camera, and articulate the message for our community.
Hip hop, and Kendrick Lamar's work in particular, represents a musical culture that relates to millennials; however, gospel music has had a wide and consistent appearance in black activist spaces and would also serve this generation's activism as well. In conjunction with the black church, gospel music has always been critical to any movements that black folks have led in the United States. The Mizzou case was interesting because gospel music was mostly not featured during the days of work in marches and protests. Leaders were mindful about the different faiths that were represented among the growing number of allies in the camp or in other spaces. I watched more white students joining the black students and other students of color. These new allies looked nervous but excited to hold hands and join the movement.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Portia K. MaultsbyAcknowledgmentsIntroduction to Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection / Fernando Orejuela 1. BlackMizzou: Music and Stories One Year Later / Stephanie Shonekan2. Black Matters: Black Folk Studies and Black Campus Life Matters / Fernando Orejuela 3. Blackfolklifematters: SLABs and The Social Importance of Contemporary African American Folklife / Langston Collin Wilkins 4. BlackMusicMatters: Affirmation and Resilience in African American Musical Spaces in Washington, D.C. / Alison Martin5. Black Detroit: Sonic Distortion Fuels Social Distortion / Denise DalphondConclusion: Race, Place, and Pedagogy in the Black Lives Matter Era / Stephanie ShonekanIndexWhat People are Saying About This
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[This] volume is written from the heart of the BLM movement: the authors' stance as politically committed, or 'engaged,' scholars lends the work an immediacy poignantly buttressing its academic value.
"[This] volume is written from the heart of the BLM movement: the authors' stance as politically committed, or 'engaged,' scholars lends the work an immediacy poignantly buttressing its academic value.