A Response to Bryan Parkhurst: Racism, SMT, and Not Knowing What We're Actually Talking About

(This post is fairly in the weeds about “Schenker-Gate.” I will assume readers are relatively familiar with the events of music theory’s “reckoning.” If you are not familiar with #schenkergate, this probably isn’t for you, and you can probably save your 15 minute read)

With Phil Ewell’s 2019 SMT keynote coming up on its 5 year anniversary, I find myself fascinated by the response to it. While there are some obviously scandalous details, the reality is that the discussion, which persists to this day, seems to be stuck in the mud. The latest polemic entry that fails to shift the tenor of the conversation is Bryan Parkhurst’s review of Ewell’s subsequent book. In his review, Parkhurst makes some strong complaints (to put it lightly) about the SMT’s Jazz Interest Group’s (JIG) choice to rename the Steve Larson Award to The Excellence in Jazz Scholarship award. As the member of the JIG who proposed the name change and as a person who served on the committee that wrote the proposal, I find Parkhurst’s rhetoric to be, bluntly, ignorant, acritical, and hypocritical. While I do not think Parkhurst is a racist (a claim that I think has little value when describing individual people), I do find his argument is only possible through his unacknowledged racial identity. Parkhurst thinks his argument holds water because he is white. In this sense, I do think his rhetoric is racist. This essay serves as my response to Parkhurst’s claims. I will respond to Parkhurst’s claim to explain why his accusation that we engaged in nothing more than a reactionary, scorched earth policy is a blatant misreading of our intentions. Further, I argue that Parkhurst misunderstands our intentions because he, like many other music theorists, does not engage with studies of race in any significant manner, and that produces epistemic blindspots. 

While this essay is nominally a defense of the JIG's choice (and, to a lesser extent, Ewell's argument), it is a deeper probing of the field's shortcomings. Normally, I don't think the bad takes of one scholar would be worth airing out in this manner, but I think the obtuse nature of Parkhurst's thought is actually emblematic of a greater issue in the field: we, as a field, cannot discuss race if no one actually knows what they are talking about. A child born during Ewell's talk would have just started kindergarten, and discussions of race and music theory (at least in the mainstream discourses of SMT) feel equally infantile. As happy as I am to see that Ewell has brought these issues to the table, for reasons that will become abundantly clear in this essay, the metaphoric silverware is still yet to be set. While my strongest rhetoric is directed towards Parkhurst, that is because I feel Parkhurst has refused to take my thoughts as a colleague seriously in a manner that I find insulting, but the field-wide claims I make have as much force behind them as my rebuttal to Parkhurst's argument.

I would like to reiterate that I am speaking for myself, and not members of the JIG or SMT more broadly, although I would like it acknowledged that I did not write the blurb that went out to the SMT newsletter and thus Parkhurst was not engaging in any discussion with my thoughts, but just the reflection of what he thinks I believe through a short blurb in a newsletter that he read.

First, I would like to say that I find the first part of Parkhurst’s review of Ewell to be pretty insightful, and frankly don’t think Ewell’s treatment of the issue is the best way to understand racism as it pertains to music studies (to this point, I think Clifton Boyd and Jade Conlee’s MTO review provides a much more nuanced and accurate analysis of Ewell’s shortcomings in regards to race). Parkhurst’s main critique is the charge that Ewell falls for a “‘Post-Modern anything-goes-ism” (159), a term he borrows from Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton. Parkhurst rightfully notes that Ewell’s condemnation of Schenker rests on noting the analogous similarities between Schenker’s own beliefs about music, his beliefs about non-white people, and Ewell’s definitions of racism. Parkhurst summarizes the analogous slippage in Ewell’s argument as such: Schenkerian analysis ↔ Schenker’s views of social hierarchy ↔ Schenker’s racism. Given that there are differences between Schenker’s view of race, music theory, and hierarchy in general, to equate these issues is a rhetorical fallacy. Parkhurst thinks this produces an unnuanced racial essentialism that reifies the notion that Schenkerian analysis is white, but other forms of analysis are Black. By accepting a racially divided premise, Parkhurst argues we have drawn philosophical lines in the sand that are not real and produce a “pitiless, unreflective, Red Brigade iconoclasm” (163). Parkhurst argues that SMT JIG’s choice to rename its award is an exemplar of the witch-hunt mentality of Ewell’s argument being taken to an illogical extreme. Parkhurst believes this extremity is a product of Ewell’s semiotic slippage.

While I do not disagree with Parkhurst’s general claim, the argument only holds water if someone thinks of it as removed from the lived experience of Blackness and race. While Parkhurst, a white man, clearly will never have access to this lived experience, his misunderstanding of the politics of Blackness leaves him fundamentally unable to engage with any sort of nuanced discussion of racism.1

Let’s talk about citational practice in Parkhurst’s essay. For a 40-page review (very long for a book review), the list of citations is as impressive as it is wide-ranging. In a matter of pages (and sometimes sentences) Parkhurst jumps from Newton to Hegel, Clarence Thomas to Darwin, Susan McClarey to Hamlet. Oddly, canonic figures in Black studies/race studies are entirely absent. While I do not know all of the scholars cited by Parkhurst, most of the studies of racism he cites are mentioned in passing about specific discussions of racism. While I cannot comment on the quality or scope of Bruce Lincoln’s 2002 article on Isaac Newton’s participation in the slave trade, I am fairly confident that it does not present a wide-ranging theory of racism. I am fairly confident that Bruce Lincoln is not a foundational name in the study of race. I am pretty confident assuming that Parkhurst had to do some quick googling to find the specific article that legitimizes his reading of Newton. What I can tell you is I have never seen Bruce Lincoln cited in a discussion on racism before (which is not to critique Lincoln's work). For an article about racism, Parkhurst, a scholar who does not work in a field that explicitly discusses/theorizes racism, seems comfortable without any theoretical apparatus for approaching discussions of race.

Despite this essay clearly being written to performatively demonstrate how wide-ranging of a thinker Parkhurst is, his gambit ultimately exposes his shortcomings. Scholars such as W.E.B DuBois, bell hooks, Franz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Richard Dyer, Angela Davis, George Yancy, Micheal Ommi and Howard Winant, Cedric Robinson, Aime Césaire, Saidiya Hartman, Sara Ahmed, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and many other canonic figures all theorize race in ways that would be useful to Parkhurst. I don’t see any of those names in Parkhurst’s bibliography. I’m supposed to trust the white guy’s opinion about racism that is not informed by any fundamental figures in race studies? That’s what qualifies as good meta-level discussions on the interactions between race and music theory? This aversion to citing people who actually talk and think about racism is a stain on Music Analysis. Given the nature/length of the review, I’m not sure if it was peer-reviewed or if the journal editors themselves had the ultimate green light, but such citational malpractice should have caused this review to be D.O.A.

Noting that Parkhurst doesn’t seem to cite canonic scholars isn’t just a call to cite more non-white scholars, its fallout weakens Parkhurst’s argument. I cannot understand how Parkhurst wants to define racism in this article. It seems like his view on the matter is that racists think of non-white people as lesser and non-racists think of everyone as equal. During his critique of the JIG’s decision, Parkhurst states, “I’ll wager that many people will struggle to get the hang of the intended distinction between ‘personal racism’, on the one hand, and harboring a racially demeaning sentiment or subscribing to an expressly white-supremacist theory, on the other hand. I for one don’t see that there could be a genuine distinction to get the hang of” (163). I think any person who has a nuanced understanding of racism would realize that the distinction between “personal racism” and “expressly white-supremacist theory” is not what people refer to when they distinguish between racism as a personal and social issue. Stokely Carmicheal (someone Parkhurst doesn’t engage with) famously claimed, “If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power.” Racism, first and foremost, is an issue of economics; it is an issue of material wealth, and it is a problem that causes real inequality. When we discuss racism, we are not discussing the feelings of minoritized and non-minoritized subjects (which is not to say that those feelings don’t matter), rather we are talking about the ways societies are structured to purposely disenfranchise non-white people. Regardless if one is talking about the genocide in Gaza, the modern prison industrial complex, or the lack of healthcare and affordable housing, they all result in the same end goal: a redesigning of society that materially advantages a select group of white people at the expense of Black people.2 To be clear, the feelings of minoritized subjects are produced through the material disenfranchisement of minoritized populations. Class and racism are forever intertwined (or as Stuart Hall, again someone Parkhurst does not cite, puts it, “race is the modality by which class is lived”). 

I think Parkhurst would do well to engage with the thinkers mentioned above. His understanding of racial essentialism is equally uncritical. In perhaps the most famous excerpt from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask (a foundational text in postcolonial studies), he describes sitting on a train while a white child exclaims, “Look! A Negro!” over and over again. In this moment, Fanon is reduced down to his skin color. He is essentialized despite his non-essentialized existence. Fanon notes that this is only a problem faced by Black people. As nonessential subjects, they have to deal with society's essentializing gaze. Jazz musicians certainly felt the notions of an essentializing gaze (see Ingrid Monson's article on or James Baldwin's response to Mailer's "The White Negro," or the third chapter of my forthcoming dissertation for a more indepth discussion of this essentializing gaze). Fanon uses this to note that Blackness is always a paradox. It creates free subjects understood to be essentialized. Fanon’s critique then becomes a critique of Hegel/Sartre’s treatment of the non-descript Other, it is a challenge to their epistemic assumptions of a universal equality that neither thinker truly believes in (Sartre is much better on this matter, but Hegel, a.k.a., Mr. History starts with Europe, is much worse) Given this paradox, Guthrie Ramsey (a scholar who Parkhurst doesn’t engage with) argues for what he calls the “pot-liquor” theory of essentialism. In this, Ramsey acknowledges that we often have to make some appeal to essentialism when discussing race because racism reduces subjects down to an essentialized identity. It does seem like the term “strategic essentialism,” (which is rather commonly used in Black studies) is foreign to Parkhurst’s understanding of race. While it is easy to refute the essentializing statements that “Immigrants are rapists and murderers who kill dogs,” in order to actually understand the meaning of those horrific statements we have to be willing to engage with notions of essentialism because the debate is already structured around notions of essentialism. That statement is different from saying we should condone essentialism. Personally, I am beginning to feel some of the realities of SMT looking at me as “one of the minorities who will vocally talk about race.” While this is a product of my outspoken nature (and, as this essay shows, I will talk about race), it does mean white scholars can define my skin tone as an essential being of my character. While my Brown skin is undeniably an essential part of my identity, it is deeply concerning to realize such a line of logic exists because I cannot control any further assumptions my peers will make about my racial identity as they understand it. Bluntly, Parkhurst, as a white man, does not understand the lived complexity of this situation.

This citing malpractice becomes emblematic of Parkhurst’s misunderstandings of racism and the academic study of racism. In fact, we can contrast this to Clifton Boyd and Jade Conlee’s review of Ewell’s book, where they read Ewell’s decision to share his personal experiences in dialogue with other Black thinkers, “Concerning the later, Maxile, Ramsey, and Southern have all published and/or spoken about their experiences of being Black scholars in music studies (Maxile 2009, 2021; Ramsey 2001, 2004, 2022; Southern 1981). Ramsey has written vulnerably and in multiple venues about the state of music studies (both musicology and music theory).” With this quote, Boyd and Conlee value the sharing of Black experiences as a radical act that seeks to challenge epistemic assumptions of history. Boyd and Conlee cite Hartman’s thinking on the matter. Throughout her oeuvre, Hartman notes the absence of Black voices throughout history and that in order to come to a more accurate picture of history, we must “critically fabulate” the lived experiences of minoritized subjects throughout history, as these were the voices that were forever excluded from the written records. Hartman asks us what it would mean to reconsider history from the vantage point of the enslaved person. How would doing so shape the historical narratives that we participate in? How would the world look if such horrors were reframed in a foundationally shattering way? In this sense, Ewell’s most grand revisioning applies such a brand of thinking to music theory. What would music theory look like if we approached the subject in a truly holistic manner, free from the baggage of racist ideologies that we all harbor? Would we find new value in that which was overlooked? Would we find we have critically overvalued certain epistemic practices?

Parkhurst may retort that I am following into a similar rhetorical fallacy as Ewell, which could be diagrammed as not citing ↔ erasure ↔ racism, but it is precisely because of his lack of a material understanding of racism that he doesn’t understand why such an impasse is important. For all of the declining prestige of university positions, we should not lose sight of the fact that a tenure track position in music theory is, by in large, a comfy gig. Even at the lowest ends of the spectrum, where profs are making 50k at the minimum, they are still getting a relatively good-paying job. I know a lot of really good jazz musicians who would kill for a stable 50k job, and historically, many Black jazz musicians would have loved to gain such employment through university structures. While some jazz musicians got these jobs, none that I know of were in traditional theory research positions (and the existence of a counter-example or two does not override the structural argument I am making). In an article that I have only seen a draft of (and I’m not sure what happened to it), Rich Pellegrin (a theorist whose work I am rather fond of despite it being mostly Schenkerian and Schenkerian-adjacent) notes that there still isn’t a tenure (or even tenure-track) music theorist who is Black who studies jazz at an R1 research institution. While there are three up-and-coming Asian jazz music theorists (myself, Dustin Chau, and Sam Falotico) who may add some diversity to SMT’s tenured ranks, none of us are Black. When Black scholars get tenure-track positions, they are denied tenure far more often than their white peers. If I recall correctly, Ewell was denied tenure and had to sue Hunter College to access the benefits of his hard work. This is music theory, as an institution, being racist as a way to deny the material benefits of tenured positions from Black scholars.This isn’t about semiotic slippage, it’s about who gets jobs, who gets raises, who gets prestige, who gets worker’s rights and protections. 

With such framing in mind, we can pull apart what I meant when I accuse Steve Larson of being complicit in structural racism but not being a racist himself.3 Steve Larson’s work, by its Schenkerian nature, is visible and legible to SMT broadly. There is a reason why he could get a PhD at a high-ranking institution (Michigan), why he could get a tenure track gig at a prestigious program (Oregon), and why his work was so widely distributed and published. Getting accepted to a Ph.D. program is explicitly a message from the field that this is what we value. The same statement is even more true when discussing who gets tenure-track positions and who gets cited. Steve Larson wouldn’t get tenure if people think his work was worth engaging with. Steve Larson’s work made sense to music theorists in the 90s. At that point (which is still true today), the field was overwhelmingly white and male. Steve Larson talked about jazz in a way that they could understand. Contrast that with George Russell. Russell’s metaphysical views of jazz are equally nuanced and insightful as Larson’s but rather alien to the average SMT-goer. One of them gets a vaunted theory position, one doesn’t. Russell’s stylistic idiosyncrasies do not justify his exclusion from academic musical theoretical circles. Scholars, most notably Marc Hannaford, have attempted to make Russell’s work more legible to SMT audiences. The fact that Russell needs Hannaford to validate his work is the problem, but one that the JIG members are actively trying to combat. For the Black scholars that get tenure-track positions in SMT, to have their work valued by the field, they have to be legible to the (mostly) white audiences of SMT. That’s the racism of SMT.

Also, no one should be crying tears over Steve Larson not having an award named after him. The field has been more than fair to Steve Larson, and seemingly supported him at every step of his career. If the grand indictment of Steve Larson’s contribution to this problem of the field is that he doesn’t have an award named after him, then racism in the field is not affecting him in any meaningful way.

In her monograph Jazz as Critique, Fumi Okiji reads (or perhaps purposefully misreads) Adorno’s writings on jazz and culture to align them with tenets of afropessimistic thought. In her argument, she notes, “black life, whatever the intention of a particular actor, cannot but help be lived as a critical reflection” (26). Through her afropessimistic framing, Okiji argues that jazz demonstrates how to embody such critical reflection and navigate the nuances of an essentialized life. I would like to read this quote in dialogue with two often-cited theories of the genesis of the term “bebop.” In the first, bebop represents the style of articulation of post-Swing jazz. Players like Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian didn’t really swing their 8ths as part of a 2:1 triplet subdivision but rather would play straight 8ths and then accent the off-beat 8th note (as opposed to the more traditional way of accenting the downbeat). This produces a phrasing akin to saying the word “beBop,” where the second syllable is accented. The second version claims bebop was related to police violence, that bebop was the sound made by a cop unjustly beating a Black man. The baton goes be-bop as it makes impact. I find no reason to not hold these two theories in dialogue with one another. They both matter towards understanding the genre. The formal qualities of bebop make some commentary on the latter.

The first definition should be coherent to anyone who has a graduate-level understanding of music theory. Scholars understand the terminology of “accent,” “off-beat,” and “phrasing.” While these people could understand the latter, nothing in their training would prepare them for the nuanced political discussion it entails. In dealing with the latter, those music theorists are no more prepared to discuss the issues than regular members of society. While plenty of theorists can hang in academic conversations of racism, that is rarely a product of their academic training, it’s far more likely they did that research on their own.

In this current academic zeitgeist, SMT, as an institutional network of interrelated actors, can only reward those who understand bebop through the first definition. Going through the works published in Music Theory Online and Spectrum, it is clear those definitions hold plenty of weight. However, anything that seems to resemble the latter definition of bebop is almost entirely absent from these discussions. While there are clear exceptions, our analytic practices are mostly divorced from the socio-cultural analysis of the genre. Thinking of jazz as both a set of social signifiers tied to Blackness and its formal musical properties allows us to note how historical discourses of racism have fundamentally shaped our ability to talk about the genre. The point of noting the similarities between the two is to explicate how discussions of the former co inform discussions of the latter. 

I admit that changing the name is a mostly symbolic gesture. However, such a critique is significantly different from saying symbols don’t matter. When we (and I am on the award committee this year/was on it last year/and will chair it next year) give an award, we are saying, “This is what the best future version of the field looks like.” While one can disagree with my vantage point that the best future version of the field is one that incorporates both views of bebop (as both a high modernist, nuanced, unique art style and as one that is a product of the socially lived realities of Blackness), one cannot deny that the goal of the motion is significantly more nuanced than Parkhurst thinks it is.

For the record, last year’s winner’s (Johnathan De Souza) work was more in line with Larson’s work than anything I am calling for in this essay. I happily signed off on the decision to give the award to De Souza, suggesting that I am perfectly capable of acknowledging when such differences do and do not reflect on the quality of a scholarly analysis.

Notably, my rationale for the name change does not mention the aspect of Larson’s work that is generally tied to his racism. Most critics of Larson note the short-sighted nature of his claim that voice-leading graphs can show the quality (or lack thereof) of an improvisation. Moreover, Parkhurst, rightfully, notes that Larson’s claim is bogus.4 But it is not the claim itself that makes Larson’s statement racist. By itself, it is a (debatably) defensible position. I think most tonal jazz (or tonal-adjacent jazz) features good voice-leading, or rather, that I can hypothesize about some relationship between what I like about a jazz solo and its voice-leading. I don’t think Black jazz musicians would disagree with this claim. Many of them were fluent in the language of Western music theory (however one defines it). My issue with the claim is the social structure by which such a claim becomes legible. Through what ideological apparatus does one take in which this is considered the hallmark for what is good or not good jazz scholarship? I don’t think Steve Larson is a bad music theorist (in fact, I find many of his arguments about jazz convincing), but I don’t think he is a model of what scholarship should look like. I don’t think his words paint a vivid picture of the nuanced relationship between jazz and the world it exists in in a way that convinces me that he gets this music past its formal properties. I want theoretical analysis to do more than that. I’m comfortable saying that many of the jazz musicians we idolize want more than that. 

(a side note, Parkhurst refers to this name change as if it is a “leftist terrorism” and asks us to seriously consider what the qualifier “at this moment” means in regard to our removal of the name. In this Parkhurst hypothetically poses what that means for people when social opinions change again and we end up looking like conservatives to future generations. To this point, I say, good. When my takes are proven to be incomplete or short-sighted, I hope they are forgotten. I will not dogmatically take the position that my beliefs are right no matter what. I understand that the times they are a changin’. Regardless, Parkhurst’s rhetoric is concerning because it is indistinguishable from a 15 year old calling someone a “blue-haired feminazi” on the internet. I do not intend this as an analogous comparison, they are literally the same. He is asking “what happens when they try to cancel all of us?” It is a fundamentally reactionary take. Parkhurst’s reference to McCarthyism is especially baffling since his publication record would imply that he is at least sympathetic to Marxist analysis. There is a pretty large body of scholarship on white men who think modern society has become a form of reverse racism that Parkhurst should dive into, I would recommend Sally Robinson’s work on the subject.)

I must admit that part of my frustration with reading Parkhurst’s review is that it reflects poorly on what we teach/are taught as music theorists. I’m afraid that the average English, cultural studies, women and gender studies, or history studies graduate student/professor would have a better frame to understand the views presented in this essay than the average music theory graduate student, despite the fact that this is explicitly an essay about music theory. Members of most other humanities fields are introduced to the writers I cite from day 1 of their studies, they understand what is at stake and what the terms of many of these discussions mean. In contrast, many music theorists can get by their entire careers without ever critically engaging with these academic lineages (Parkhurst is a well respected scholar who has). Even I, someone whose master’s advisor is a known radical in the field and who goes to a university where the music program is explicitly open to allow students to pursue their non-musical interests, have only had passing engagement with these thinkers while in music seminars. The vast majority of my knowledge of race was acquired outside of music departments. In the spring, I was privileged to TA for WashU’s “Intro to Race” course in their sociology department. Despite the course being designed for freshmen who were definitely not doing the readings, the discussions of race and racism expanded far beyond many of the references to race that will be made during SMT in a month. To some degree, that’s fine. We are music theorists and not race scholars. But to another degree, that does seem like a damning indictment on the field. One that only grows louder when we consider the structural barriers that did not preclude Parkhurst from publishing a clearly half-baked analysis of race. George Lipsitz would describe this as a “possessive investment in whiteness” where the unacknowledged realities of the white nature of the field is used to (often unknowingly) align ourselves with actions that reproduce structural and material benefits to white society at the expense of non-white populations.

I also find Parkhurst's analysis to be highly hypocritical in this regard. For someone who claims to be weary of Ewell’s irresponsible analogies, the comparisons drawn to the JIG are rather extreme. The JIG is compared to the Red Brigades and Robert E. Lee as if there is no slippage made in the equation critiquing Steve Larson ↔ acting like the Red Brigades, ↔ critiquing Robert E. Lee. Parkhurst was not present for the meeting where we discussed these issues, but if he were, he would note that many members of SMT voiced issues about their relationship to Larson. They thought highly of Larson and viewed him as a friend. Despite many group members stating this, only one or two members voted to keep the name.5 Implying that the group thinks of Larson the same way we think of Robert E. Lee is an excessively ungenerous reading of our actions. No one is saying SMT is a KKK rally or the prison industrial complex, but it does contribute to the same overarching oppression as non-white people experience the other two, and the psychological effects of all three (although clearly SMT is the least extreme of the three). In fact, taken to a logical end, Parkhurst would end up arguing that there is a slippage between jazz ↔ Blackness (which he does not make), an argument that would run dangerously close to the ludacris position that jazz is not a Black genre. Jazz and Blackness are not synonymous with each other (there are white jazz musicians and white influences in the genre), so even suggesting that they are similar runs dangerously close to essentializing thought. It shows the inconsistencies of refusing to acknowledge that race essentialism is an (unfortunate) part of society.

Without a doubt, this issue is much grander and more complicated than what theories are valued by SMT. SMT cannot control the systemic injustices that restrict the pool and associated qualities of applicants to graduate programs. But that does not mean SMT is absolved of its contributions to these issues. They are not “sins of the father,” as Parkhurst describes them; they are the continued sins of the son. SMT is still largely dominated by analytic systems that are designed to understand Western Art music. SMT is still actively hostile to non-white members (trust me, I have stories). While Music Analysis, the journal which published Parkhurst’s review, is not affiliated with SMT (at least not explicitly), it does speak to the broader theoretical landscape. My friend and colleague Audrey Slote’s forthcoming dissertation investigates the post-Schenker Gate landscape of music theory. Audrey, as I understand it, will argue that SMT has had a realization about Schenker, but Schenker is not really the main character of the story. Schenker is symbolic of the poor racial framing we think counts as critical thought in music theory circles (and for the record, Audrey’s dissertation probably makes many similar points to this essay, but she is brilliant and probably does them better than I can). I have not jumped ship from SMT yet (and the desire is stronger at some points than others) because I, within Hartman’s view, think these are issues that can be changed. That we could do something better. And that’s the driving force, at least for me, behind the name change. I want SMT to be better, and I think that means accepting that the critique I am making of Parkhurst is one we actually have to all accept. Issues of racism are not simple things, they are complex, convoluted, and contradictory discussions. The only way to make sense of them is to engage them head-on. Music theory as a field seemingly can’t even accept that those are the stakes of the game. If we are really going to have this discussion about the field, then everybody has to actually do the reading.

1. As an Indian man, I claim no ownership of the experience of Blackness, but also do claim the experience of non-whiteness.

2. This is certainly a more complicated issue than I can summarize in a few sentences, but a few Black billionaires does not mean that capitalism is good for Black people.

3. I never met Steve Larson, but I trust my peers description of him.

4. Which is not to say that this claim isn’t the deciding factor. I think similar critiques of other canonic jazz theorists (i.e., Henry Martin, Steve Strunk) could be made, but those theorists do not have any statements as egregious as Larson. This is probably a different conversation entirely if the award was the Steve Strunk award.

5. I can’t recall the exact vote distribution, but the choice was near unanimous.