Let’s take Steven Foster. What is objectionable about, say, Camptown Races?
The content is literal nonsense, so it has to be the use of the argot.
But Old Man River is written in a similar language. When I was very young, before I had ever been to North America, I saw Paul Robeson sing this in a church in Vienna. I am not alone in considering this song one of the great moments in American musical theatre.
(Interestingly, I just discovered that Robeson covered “Old Kentucky Home”, a song whose original lyrics are definitely offensive, by changing those lyrics.)
To repeat — I am very much for banning songs with objectionable content. A song like “Massa’s in De Cold Ground” has a beautiful tune but the lyrics make it offensive in any context other than purely historical, and even then only with caveats. (And yet Foster himself was a progressive his whole life, and even wrote an abolitionist play, which I have been unable to find.)
But banning an entire genre is several steps too far for me.
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There’s also a bigger picture here. I left America after thirty years there because I felt the “left” there was unable to or uninterested in making actual progress, and simply wasted their time on minutia.
Like this very issue! It’s such an unsweet spot to make an attack.
It’s guaranteed not to succeed, if only because Stephen Foster alone is so beloved by music lovers across the political spectrum. I want to re-emphasize that I am not an American and did not grow up in the United States and yet I have a strong positive association with his music.
But if it did succeed, it would have next to no effect on the day-to-day lives of people of color. Flint still doesn’t have clean water after 800 days of a Democratic Presidency and 1000 days of a Republican one. People of color in America are incarcerated at a rate not seen anywhere else in the developed world; they are more afflicted with pollution dumped on them by industrial capitalism than any other group in American society; they are robbed of their natural human rights to education and health care by a system deliberately warped against them.
Are minstrel songs really in the top 100 problems facing people of color in America today?
Don’t get me wrong — even mostly symbolic actions can have a huge effect. Let’s take the issue of “Statues of Confederate ‘war heroes’” — “traitors” in fact. Having young Black children walking to school past Confederate statues is rather like having Jewish children walking to school past a statue of Adolf Eichmann. It is demoralizing and dehumanizing on a day-to-day basis. Removing them is an essential step to restoring the balance.
And this is a war that can be won. One statue gets removed at a time. People see where the statue was and feel victory every day. No new statues are created. One day soon they will all be gone.
That is progress. Banning obscure songs that young people never hear or care about and which have already been bowdlerized to remove objectionable content is not progress.
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tl: dr;
- Ban individual songs, but not a whole genre
- The left should choose its battles more wisely
