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 would be among the first from island nations that evolved through four distinct phases:

The migration of Afro-Caribbeans to the United States may be subdivided into four distinct phases. The first stretches from the colonial period to 1900; the second from 1900 to the Great Depression of the 1930s; the third from the late 1930s to 1965; and the final one stretches from 1965 to the present. Though crucial to the development of the Caribbean population in the United States, the first two phases have been the most neglected in immigration history and deserve and call for special attention here.
“The History of Afro-Caribbean Migration to the United States”
by Winston James, Columbia University

I’ve been inspired within my soul to write in this style and to let my spirit lead me lately. I went to a fiction writer event where two Asian American writers talked of music in ways that led me to write an inspired passage of text about my research…