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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

