The Whys
This excerpt is from my forthcoming book (title to be determined) on social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in music. Some sections have been removed for purposes of clarity. This continues to be a work-in-progress.
“Begin with the end in mind.”[1]
Perhaps the most famous of the seven habits outlined in Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is habit two: "Begin with the end in mind." Though Covey is probably not the first person to utter these words, the success of his book has given the phrase global resonance.
Covey begins his discussion of the importance of cultivating the habit of beginning with the end in mind by imploring readers to consider what they would want people speaking at their funerals to say about them. But more than an exercise considering one’s legacy, Covey is trying to get readers to see that by starting with the end, and not the beginning, one can clearly see what steps are needed to attain the desired results.
To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.
It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. It’s possible to be busy—very busy—without being very effective. [2]
Covey’s advice is useful for many types of endeavors, from preparing for a vacation to preparing for a career. For example, you wouldn’t book a plane ticket before knowing your destination. Likewise, you wouldn’t enroll in culinary school expecting your degree to land you a mechanic’s job. But to bring it closer to home, let’s imagine we are planning a music event. In order for that event to be successful, we need to consider what we want the outcome to be. Covey suggests that we visualize the final outcome. I would add, that visualization is more than just being able to see the outcome in the mind’s eye, but really being able to experience it through all the senses and feel the desired outcome. For example, when we visualize our music event:
Is it outside or indoors?
Are people standing and/or sitting?
Who are the people in attendance?
What kind of music is being played?
Is the music loud or soft?
Can you feel the vibrations of the music?
Is the music performed live?
How does the music make people feel?
What’s the general vibe?
Are people dancing?
Is the event interactive?
Is there food?
Where are the bathrooms?!?
And the list goes on. The point is that in order for us to have a successful event, we need to determine the ultimate experience that we want attendees to have. With that goal in mind, we can begin to outline the steps that we need to create that experience.
The same holds true with respect to achieving social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion in music. We have to begin with the end in mind. I am assuming that most of you are reading this book for the purpose of wanting to learn how to achieve social justice in your respective spheres of music. From my experience of doing DEI work in music, too often the end goal is not adequately considered. This means that teachers, departments, administrations, and others often spend a considerable amount of time doing “busy-work”—performative work—that really does not get them closer to solving the problems of racism and social injustice in music. As Covey states, it is work that is not very effective. So, with that said, and before we delve deeper, I want each of you to consider your social justice and DEI goals. What are they? These goals may look slightly different for each of you, depending on whether you are a general music teacher, a performer, a DJ, or a theorist. Regardless, of your relationship to the subject matter, think about your goals and complete the activity on the next page.
And please know that it is possible to have the end in mind and still not know what steps to take. That’s where we look to others with more knowledge and experience to guide us. But we still need to know where we are going before we can figure out how to get there.
ACTIVITY: UNDERSTANDING OUR GOALS
Take a moment to consider your social justice and DEI goals. What are they? Write them in the space below, in a separate notebook, or on your computer. There are no right or wrong answers. We will periodically revisit your answers and you can make adjustments as needed.
WHAT’S YOUR WHY?
Now that we have identified our goals, I want us to take some time to really go within and understand what I call “our whys.” Now, I’m the first to admit that I would get extremely annoyed anytime I would go to a workshop and the facilitator would ask, “What’s your why?” As soon as that question was asked, I would morph from an attentive and enthusiastic participant into a highly irritated one. My Brooklyn attitude would emerge, and I would think to myself,
“What do you mean what’s my why? Because I feel like it!”
This type of question always seemed like workshop filler, a task just to pass the time, and nothing that I really wanted to spend time considering. But with a little bit of maturity and experience, I’ve come to realize the extreme importance of this question, particularly with respect to efforts to achieve social justice and DEI in music and other areas of life. Take a few moments to think about and respond to the questions on the following page. Your answers don’t have to be long and drawn out. This is not a dissertation, and you’re not being graded on your answer! The only stipulation is that your answers be truthful. We’ll revisit the answers to these questions later, so make sure that you respond thoroughly and honestly. Once we’ve done that, we’ll look at the connection between “our goals” and “our whys” and why it is important to be clear about both.
ACTIVITY: UNDERSTANDING OUR WHYS—WHY MUSIC?
Answer the questions below truthfully and honestly. We will revisit your answers to these questions later. If a question does not apply to you, skip it and move on to the next one.
1. Why did I become a musician?
2. Why did I get (or why am I getting) a degree in music (my specialty)?
3. Why do I teach music?
4. Why is the issue of social justice and/or diversity, equity, and inclusion in music important to me?
5. When did the issue of social justice and/or diversity, equity, and inclusion in music become important to me?
EXAMINING YOUR WHYS
Again, there are no right or wrong answers to the questions above. Your answers are what they are and may be very different from my answers and those of your peers or colleagues. That’s okay. However, there are likely to be some similarities across answers. For example, many of us probably gravitated towards teaching in music because we are musicians with a deep passion for performing, something that we wanted to share with others. Some of you may have determined that you don’t have any particular interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion other than for purposes of professional development. You may have never even thought about the topic until it was brought to your attention through your work or social connections. Whatever your responses to the questions above, own them without judgment good or bad.
Although there is no right or wrong to your answers, I did ask you those five questions very intentionally. Why is it important that we ask ourselves these questions? What I want us to gather from this self-exploration is that our whys will play an important role in determining how we approach solving inequities in music, and ultimately whether or not those approaches - and even our goals - are viable.
An aside (sort of):
There are many factors that prevent music educators from achieving their goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom. However, I often state that there is one flawed concept (which we’ll get to later) that keeps most well-intended music educators from achieving those goals. I say well-intended because this guidebook, will not be useful to you if your intentions are less than noble. So, what do I mean by less than noble intentions? We all have to search ourselves to find out what our true motives are, that is our whys. Again, diversity, equity, and inclusion have become buzz words, and some people have jumped on the bandwagon to further their careers and not truly in the interest of social justice. If you view diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field as something that needs to be achieved primarily in order to advance your career, or because you think it will make you look good (i.e. anti-racist) in the eyes of other people, then this book will not help you. And that’s because your goals and your intentions are not aligned. Diversity, equity, and inclusion at its heart (if we really are to get it right) is about social justice. So, if your reasoning for wanting to have a diverse, equitable, and inclusive field does not pertain to social justice, then again, this book will not help you.
Self-awareness, that is an understanding of what drives and motivates us, is something that I believe has been sorely lacking in our discussions of social justice and DEI in music. This is not to say that people are not questioning what motivates people to act in certain ways that are deemed racist or in some way a hindrance to social justice goals which include diversity, equity, and inclusion. In recent years, as social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion have become more mainstream, people have begun to question others and themselves.
“Am I privileged?”
“Am I anti-racist?”
“Am I woke?”
All of these are good questions to ask. However, they tend to not go deep enough in self-awareness, and there is often the danger of these questions becoming little more than intellectual exercises aimed at pleasing the outside world. Even where reflection and self-awareness have entered the field, for example in the form of auto-ethnographies and the like, they have done so only as theoretical exercises that amount to little more than “mental masturbation.”
FROM ACADEMIC AWARENESS TO SELF-AWARENESS
When I was a senior at Trinity College, I sustained an injury that prevented me from using my right hand. It was in some ways a freak accident, but I chalked it up to disobedience. Shortly before the accident, I remember telling Walter Guardyak, my jazz piano teacher since my freshman year, that I had been learning percussion in the Latin Band ensemble. This was nothing that I was doing on a full-time basis, but more as a pastime. He told me that it would be okay for me to play instruments like the timbales that utilized sticks, but warned me that as a piano player I should not play any percussion instrument that requires me to strike with an open palm, as I could damage my hand.
My Trinidadian parents had a saying (heard in other parts of the Caribbean as well), “Who doh hear, does feel.” As luck would have it, a music and dance troupe from Ghana had been visiting the college. This was a prime opportunity for the universe to give me a test in obedience. The visiting artists gave us rigorous instruction in dance, as well as taught us basic patterns on the djembe drum. Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to learn with experts, I decided to ignore my piano teacher’s warning and join the workshop. What hurt could it do? After all, it was just a workshop. Apparently, I took the instruction well and I was doing well on the drum. The musicians egged me on, and I continued going until I felt something “pop” in the area of my shoulder blade. That didn’t seem good. So, I quietly got up and excused myself from playing. I wasn’t really experiencing pain, and so I said nothing of the “pop” to anyone. Later that night, the jazz band was playing at the Underground Coffee House on campus. I was playing on the piano when I began to lose feeling in my right arm and hand. I told the director, Kris Allen, that I could no longer play, and he took over for me. Later, I went to the campus health center and eventually was seen by a sports physician who told me there was nothing wrong with me (a health bias to discuss another day in another book). This was his assessment, despite the tingling radiating from my shoulder blade down my arm and into my hands, and the fact that my hand was partially numb.
I could barely use my right hand, my dominant hand, and wore a brace for several weeks. Fortunately, I could use my left hand, but I remember being frustrated by certain things that had never been apparent to me before. First, most double doors were locked on the left side. Although I could access the handle, when I tried to pull the door open, nothing would happen. I would then have to try to open the door on the right side with my left hand! It was not an easy feat, to say the least. However, had I not gone through that experience, I would have had no concept that this was even a problem. Sure, I knew that there were left-handed people in the world (some of my immediate family members are lefties). And I’ve seen (and even used) left-handed desks to some annoyance. But I never quite understood what it was like to live as a leftie (if only briefly) in a world that caters to right-handed people. And to be real, after a while, I was able to re-enter the world as a right-handed person and not worry about the pains of being left-handed.
I started with this story to illustrate a point, that many of us have what I call “academic awareness” of inequalities, inequities, and injustices. That is, we have an overly academic or intellectual understanding of these issues but lack the experiential awareness to truly emphasize and take appropriate action to address and eradicate these injustices. To put it more succinctly:
Academic awareness is an overly academic or intellectual understanding of an issue. Academic awareness leads to faulty solutions due to both a lack of experience with the issue as well as limited amounts of self-awareness on the part of decision makers.
From my experience, most people, even well-intentioned people cannot understand something that they have never experienced, or have been so far removed from that the experience is a distant memory. Hence my example of not understanding the struggles of left-handed folks until I injured my right hand. Another example would be when in 2021, two politicians running for the position of New York City Mayor suggested that the median home price in Brooklyn is in the vicinity of $100,000.[3]
Whaaat?!?
Anyone keeping up with home prices in New York, and especially Brooklyn know that prices are close to 1 million dollars for even the humblest of homes. How can someone without a basic understanding of the cost of living in the city run the city? Part of self-awareness is knowing that you don’t know and allowing those who do to take the lead.
When it comes to racism in music studies, we run into the same issue. People who have never experienced it—racism—are in leadership positions, trying to come up with solutions to the problem of racism, of which many of them are a part. But if you have no experience with racism in music, that is, you have not been on the receiving end of it, then your job is not to come up with the solutions, but to create space for those who have experienced racism to tackle the problem. Unfortunately, what happens all too often is that people with no understanding of racism understand this junction in time where the “market value” of diversity, equity, and inclusion is high. Businesses and institutions understand that in order to remain relevant (i.e. profitable), they have to respond to the demands for change that were particularly forthcoming after the modern-day, public lynching of George Floyd. But performing change is not the same as enacting change. The former is a façade; the latter creates a generational shift in a positive direction for marginalized folks and humanity at large.
NOTES:
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (New York: Free Press, 2004 [1989], 98.
Ibid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/nyregion/median-home-brooklyn-mayor.html