XVI Colloquium: July 12 - 19, 2005:
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
"Discourses and Practices of Hegemony, Power, and Exclusion in Music Education"

Music Education, Multiculturalism, and Anti-Racism - Can We Talk?
Debbie Bradley
OISE/UT and University of Toronto

In a recent MayDay discussion group posting, an opportunity arose for me to voice some of the ideas I have wrestled with over the course of my doctoral studies and research in sociology in the area of Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Studies. In my posting I made a link between lingering colonial attitudes within discourses of music and arguments situated within anti-racism discourse. Up until the moment of my posting, the dialogue on MayDay had been rolling along vigorously, deconstructing in part the paragraph quoted below:

American culture is experiencing a cycle of aesthetic poverty. This condition is marked by society's (1) seemingly universal desire for the most immediate and primal forms of artistic expression and communication at the exclusion of the deeper and more meaningful forms; (2) serious deterioration in the expectation of quality and decency in culture; and (3) the contribution of the symptoms of this cycle to the sources of some of our society's greatest problems (crime, homelessness, depression, etc.).

The dialogue, however, came to an abrupt halt when I added my views on the above, as articulated from within an anti-racism education perspective:

Cathy Benedict was, I believe, kind in her observation that "primal forms of artistic expression" borders on racism. Racism is not defined only as overt statements or actions of prejudice. Racism is also (and more importantly) the injury that results to individuals and entire groups through statements, actions, and closed systems, whether or not injury was intended. Denigration of cultural expression is not only a left-over colonial attitude, it is a criterion upon which practitioners of "primal artistic expressions" are sometimes denied access to university music programs, devalued in school systems, and as a result of the devaluation, disengage from or are pushed out of the education system at frighteningly young ages. Symptoms of the cycle. . . .

The ensuing retreat into silence from May Day subscribers may in part be indicative of the discomfort surrounding issues of race and racism, even among those involved with critical pedagogy. My paper outlines in brief basic premises of anti-racism education as a critical pedagogy. The paper argues that liberal multiculturalism and multicultural music education is not, as is sometimes presumed (Volk, 1998), inherently anti-racist in either its design or intent. Rather, forms of official multiculturalism are discourses of hegemony (Dei, 2000) operating from within the invisible white norm: The language invoked in policies related to multiculturalism occludes race within the languages of visible minorities and cultural diversity. Existing in tandem with, but apart from official multiculturalism is popular or lived multiculturalism (Bannerji, 2000; Gilroy, 2000; Hesse, 2000), wherein I believe opportunities to disrupt hegemony are located.

Interviews with members of the Mississauga Festival Youth Choir as part of my doctoral research provide insight into how both official multicultural and anti-racism discourses work to influence attitudes and beliefs among the adolescent choir members (Bradley, In progress). Although the interviews suggest that a critical pedagogy of anti-racism multicultural music education can disrupt hegemonic constructions of subjectivity based upon race, culture and multi-cultures, other discourses, including nationalism and official multiculturalism, work against multicultural music education's goal of "cultural understanding" (Campbell, 2004). In some cases these discourses serve to reify stereotypes and colonial attitudes, indicating the need for further decolonization and anti-racism work if we wish to achieve the sort of deep cultural understanding that would make the emergence of a "multicultural human subject" (Bradley, In progress) possible. The goal of the presentation was to open a space for discussion of the difficult issues of race and racism relative to music education, through inclusion of anti-racism (critical multiculturalism) discourse and praxis.

The discussion following the presentation began with an acknowledgement from several people that they were uncomfortable talking about race. It was suggested that a future May Day presentation could address this issue, perhaps providing specific guidance on "talking race". I am willing to help facilitate such a discussion as a first step towards deconstructing whiteness within the May Day group. Although this was an excellent beginning, the discussion diverted almost immediately to non-racial issues and served as further evidence to the discomfort surrounding talking race in the academy.

Alexandra Kertz-Welzel's paper brought to light an essay by Adorno (not yet translated into English), and raised an interesting tension related to music education and ideologies. In that essay Adorno was concerned with the misuse of music education as a tool to inculcate Nazism among German people during the Third Reich. Adorno argues against using music education to "create better people" or to further goals such as "freedom" and "democracy," as these vague concepts can easily be subverted to become tools of fascism, demonstrated so horrifically by the Third Reich. Kertz-Welezel's paper led me to consider how anti-racism education has potential to become such an ideology. I would suggest, however, that as a form of critical pedagogy, anti-racism's goal is to empower students to understand and resist oppressions within the education system and society generally, and is not a fascistic approach to music education. Nonetheless, the ideological possibilities within anti-racism can easily be misused; thus, the call to educate ethically (Bowman, 2002) needs to remain centered in our thinking and praxis as music educators.

References

Bannerji, H. (2000). The dark side of the nation: Essays on multiculturalism, nationalism, and gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, Inc.

Bowman, W. (2002). Educating musically. In R. Colwell & C. Richardson (Eds.), The new handbook of research on music teaching and learning. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bradley, D. (In progress). Global song, global citizens? Multicultural choral music education and the community youth choir: Constituting the multicultural human subject.

Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario.

Campbell, P. S. (2004). Teaching music globally: Experiencing music, expressing culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dei, G. S. (2000). Power, knowledge and anti-racism education. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Gilroy, P. (2000). Against race. Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press.

Hesse, B. (Ed.). (2000). Un/settled multiculturalisms: Diasporas, entanglements, 'transruptions'. London: Zed Books.

Kertz-Welzel, A. (2005). Music education, fascism, and the "musikant": Adorno on making music, MayDay Colloquium 2005: Discourses and practices of hegemony, power, and exclusion in music education. University of British Columbia, Vancouver: MayDay Group.

Volk, T. M. (1998). Music, education, and multiculturalism: Foundations and principles. New York: Oxford University Press.