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Thursday, June 18 , 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

Confronting a legacy
of racism in country

Black squares. Thoughts and prayers.

“Love,” heart emojis and hashtags. That
about sums up the country music communi-
ty’s response to the recent uprisings for racial
justice that were sparked by the murders
of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud
Arbery and so many others. Instead of using
their platforms to advocate for change and
denounce white supremacy, many country
artists have been reprehensibly quiet.

As a longtime fan of the genre, I’d be lying

if I said I was surprised by the silence. Art-
ists’ flowery calls for “peace” and “unity”
might as well be plucked from the lyrics of
hit songs like Tim McGraw’s “Humble and
Kind” or Luke Bryan’s “Most People Are
Good.” Fear of backlash for taking a stance
is so prevalent in country music, the pre-
sumed resulting downfall for doing so has its
own verb: getting “Dixie Chicked.” But don’t
get me wrong. This isn’t the time to lament
artists’ avoidance of anything “political” or
make excuses for a culture that skirts around
the “controversial.” It’s time to get specific.
We need to talk about country music’s rela-
tionship with white supremacy.

Before there was “country music” and

“R&B,” there was “hillbilly” or “old time”
music and “race records.” “Hillbilly music”
was strictly sung by white people, while
“race records” were exclusively recorded
by Black people. But the music itself? It was
all the same kind of sound. Predominantly
poor Southerners, white and Black, had been
swapping songs, techniques and styles for
years. Much before the recording industry,
which got its start in the 1920s, could offi-
cially start to segregate the music by using
different labels. Hank Williams, for example,
learned to play guitar from the Black street
performer Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Lesley
Riddle, a Black musician, accompanied A.P.
Carter of the Carter Family on song-collect-
ing trips throughout Appalachia.

Of course, appropriation is important to

this story too. Few people know of “Tee-Tot”
Payne or Lesley Riddle, but Hank Williams
and the Carter Family are country music
legends. How many other influential Black
musicians have been forgotten, only to have
their contributions live on, and be credited
to, white performers? The history of the
banjo provides another example. Today,
the banjo is a decidedly country instru-
ment associated with whiteness. But, it has
African origins. The banjo was a plantation
instrument solely played by enslaved people
decades before blackface entertainers popu-
larized it in minstrel shows in the 1830s.

The institutions dedicated to telling coun-

try music’s story have played a part in pre-
serving the myth of its essential whiteness.
Three out of the 139 members of the Coun-
try Music Hall of Fame are Black. The label
executives who guide country music’s future
have contributed as well. When Charley
Pride was first releasing records in 1967, his
label didn’t send promotional pictures of him
to radio. Darius Rucker’s country career was
only made possible by his previous success
as the Hootie and the Blowfish frontman.
The narratives surrounding the careers of
newcomers Kane Brown and Jimmie Allen
are examples of this too. As successful Black
country artists, they have been tokenized —
simultaneously used to represent industry
“inclusion” and made to feel like they don’t
belong, like Black music and Black people
aren’t key to country music’s very existence.
This is acutely insulting when so many
hit songs on country radio today are heav-
ily influenced by hip hop and R&B. Thomas
Rhett’s rise to fame was bolstered by synths,
sound effects and dance beats. Sam Hunt lit-
erally raps on almost all of his songs. Their
acceptance as “country” has been met with
criticism, but Rhett and Hunt, both white,
have been accepted nonetheless. The same
can’t be said for Lil Nas X. “Old Town Road”
was excluded from Billboard’s Hot Country
chart for “not being country enough” — a
move that echoes the decision to separate
genres by race from nearly 100 years ago.

This history has cultivated a culture that

is not only unwelcoming of non-whiteness,
but distinctly anti-Black. A few weeks ago,
I came across a post that some of country’s
more outspoken artists were sharing on their
Instagram stories. Rachel Berry, a Black
country music lover, shared the nervousness
she’s experienced while attending concerts.
Before buying tickets, she looks up “the
name of the town/city and then ‘racism,’”
when she wants to stand up for a song, she
worries “‘what if someone yells a racial slur
at me?’” and when she walks through a festi-
val full of confederate flags, Berry writes that
she feels “uneasy.” Her story went viral and
for good reason. Everything she wrote seems
obvious upon reading it. But having gone to
quite a few country music concerts myself, I
have to confront the less obvious fact that my
whiteness has shielded me from those kinds
of worries. When I’ve seen confederate flags
waving in the parking lot of a concert venue
or printed on a fan’s t-shirt, I have had the
privilege of merely looking away. How many
Black country fans haven’t seen their favor-
ite artists in concert for their own safety?

KATIE BEEKMAN

Daily Arts Writer

FILM NOTEBOOK
FILM NOTEBOOK

Film and the history
of racism in America

In the summer of 2016, my cousin and I saw

“Southside with You,” a biographical indie film
depicting Barack and Michelle Obama’s first
date in 1989, filled with intelligent conversa-
tions between the future POTUS and FLO-
TUS about everything from bigotry to desserts.
After Michelle and Barack watch a screening
of Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing,”
the two run into a white colleague from their
law firm, who expresses confusion about the
film’s end: Mookie (the film’s main character,
played by Lee) throws a garbage can through
the storefront window and incites violence
from bystanders. Barack tells his colleague that
Mookie did it to save the white storeowner — a
common justification used by people who didn’t
understand the film — but after he and Michelle
are alone, he makes the truth clear: “Mookie
threw that trash can because he was fucking
angry.”

These words have been echoing through my

mind as I watch the Black Lives Matter move-
ment unfold over the death of George Floyd.
Between the peaceful protests and strong social
media coverage, some people have focused on
moments of violence and looting peppered
throughout the movement, finding riots to be
just as coarse and confusing as white audienc-
es did in 1989. White critics and viewers who
watched “Do the Right Thing” in 1989 clung
to their explanation because they struggled to
comprehend the place of violence in the conflict
— if Mookie threw the trash can with the good
intentions of saving Sal, they think, then the vio-
lence is justified. The belief that violence dele-
gitimizes the movement only demonstrates that
these people don’t understand the conflict. And
the fact that I was surprised by Barack’s com-
ment while watching this movie in 2016 means
that I don’t really understand it either.

These past few weeks have seen a whirlwind

of protests as the Black Lives Matter movement
gains steam across the country. There are many
ways to get involved, whether it’s marching in
protests, donating to bail funds or buying from
Black-owned businesses. It’s also crucial for
non-Black allies to take this time and educate
themselves. There are many ways to do this:
reading books or articles, listening to podcasts,
watching speeches from community leaders,
etc. Simple education on the Civil Rights move-
ment is half the battle; the other half is forcing
yourself to realign your view of the world to
match those who have been oppressed for cen-
turies. I turned to watching films, inspired by
lists I’d seen circulating around social media.
Film has long been an effective method of tell-
ing stories that aren’t always told and sharing
voices that aren’t always heard, capable of fill-
ing in some blanks left by the American educa-
tion system. Fictional or not, these stories are
powerful, able to humanize people that are
consistently dehumanized by the system and
the media.

In January, I reviewed “Clemency” for the

Daily, heralding it as a tragic but important
depiction of the crippling prison system and
death row. What I didn’t mention is that it took
days after I’d watched it to process the full force
of the story. It was a glimpse into a system so
broken and destructive — murder that is sanc-
tified because the state said it was okay, based
on a crime that the man likely didn’t do. By
becoming embedded in the story, you’re forced
to acknowledge the sheer inhumanity of the
system. Understanding the consequences of
institutionalized racism and realities of police
brutality is not simple — there are many layers
to the conflict, extending from the macro to the
micro.

KARI ANDERSON

Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
MUSIC NOTEBOOK

Read more at michigandaily.com