Chapter Seven - Ethnomusicological Empathy: Excavating a Black Graduate Student’s Heartland

Summary

I am an ethnomusicologist from outer space. A Black one planted into the margins of Tallahassee's fertile soil. My skin is Black, hair shining a coily brown, and it locs together with a twist of my finger. When the light is right you might see my eyes glow purple. But I can assure you, I am not from Mars. A white man named Nettl did not write about me. Black ethnomusicologists and musicologists are erased from the canonical histories of our field; through personal study I became aware of the works of Gertrude Robinson, Eileen Southern, Samuel A. Floyd, Ashenafi Kebede, among others based in the United States whose research on African American and African diasporic musics were not assigned to be read in introductory courses. I am born in the way Ashenafi Kebede lived, in the way the rest of my Black ethnomusicological ancestors lived. And just so you’re sure, know that it's our rage, isolation, and grief that birthed us.

But I invite you all into a moment of witnessing my story, a last-ditch excursion into the history of my own musical heartland as it lies desolate and burning. Here I write from the perspective of a Black ethnomusicologist-intraining from outer space. By writing myself into a tradition of Afrofuturist self-definition as articulated by Martine Syms, I wish to situate myself on a spectrum that includes Bruno Nettl's “ethnomusicologist from Mars” in Schools of Music and Mellonee Burnim's “Culture Bearer and Tradition Bearer.” I take this stance to show the costs of anti-Black racism on Black students’ imagination, an imagination of their scholarly futures and the possibility of building multiracial coalition. In this essay I share three stories of failed attempts at anti-racist alliance building, paired with insights from race and racism scholars such as Derald Wing Sue, Zeus Leonardo, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. These kinds of anti-Blackness cause Black graduate students to become displaced from various aspects and relationships in the beginning of our scholarly careers; in reading them, hearing them, and attending to them, you are granted but a taste of our experiences.

What does it mean for Black students to build an anti-racist coalition with non-Black students?