Ethics + Antiphony: Situating musical blackness from a different standpoint

Inspired by an interview by Colson Whitehead with Harry Belafonte in The Guardian on justice and the lack of moral center in our last president’s politics of tyranny that doesn’t confront the blights of oppression affecting the dispossessed — poverty not just opportunity.

Ethics has been an ever-present concern for me throughout my life. I initially — after wanting to be a singer since 2 — imagined law would be my occupation. I was discouraged by the indifference to justice I saw in the law from an Al Pacino film “And Justice For All,” I think was its title.

As I heard Belafonte speak, I thought, let me bring his music into my Black American Music course. Why? Because the textbook I am using is not inclusive of the non-Southern U.S. rooted black folk who contributed to African American music in this nation from Belafonte’s “Day-O” where patois is inscribed into the music along with the lilt and sway of island music to DJ (or Selector) Kool Herc and his Herculords (sound system) with its Jamaican vibe.

My course is about 100 students and most are of them are black of Caribbean descent. There are only a dozen non-black students and the rest of the class is made of folk like me. Descendants of at least one parent whose presence in the U.S. precedes the influx of migration from the Caribbean first and the nations of Africa due to changes in immigration law. While Haitian immigration began as early as the 19th century in the U.S., it…