I wrote a letter to my anti-racist book group

Sunday 29th October 2023, my kitchen table.

Hi everyone,

Thank you for reading this. I hope you’re all well this Halloween weekend. I’m looking forward to being with you later this week in book group. We hopefully won’t dwell on this when we meet, because we have bigger things to talk about, like the exterminating urges of West European colonial powers. But it’s rolling along underneath as I listen and learn. 

This piece of writing has been knocking on my brain for months. I don’t know what it’s going to become, actually, but I do know that it can only happen because of our reflective process over the last two years. I’m addressing you by name, but I’m also hoping this text will be published somewhere, in this form. 

So why have I started this in the form of a letter?

I’ll tell you later.

We all had different motivations for joining our anti-racist book group. In fact we joined at different times, bringing different life experiences, facing different struggles, seeking different answers. Yet gather we do, around texts, questions, moments of celebration and times of rage. My motivations arose mainly from my experience of living in an anti-racist household, one where my home life is full of somewhat second-hand, vicarious journeys of challenging racism, learning concepts and adopting vocabulary through observing other people’s work of meaning-making.

I felt slightly like I knew how I should think, what I should say, what I should feel, but I had to find my own voice in this. I could read all the texts I liked, watch all the YouTube clips of Dr Cornel West or Prof Fred Moten that my algorithm threw at me, but I knew I was not living as fully in the dimension of anti-racism as I could. I also had no small hunch that a group of music therapists and music practitioners would help me find my voice. I learned through our first book journey that I had become highly skilled in my virtue signalling, slick as you like so that my signals were perhaps more bats of the eyes than sweeps of semaphore. I was pained to see my white saviour motivations for what they were.

What dimension of anti-racism do we live in when we are white, cis, middle aged, middle class, professional, liberal, male-identifying bodies? 

Even the kind of gay I am risks being a cis-het analogue, despite my queer politics. I’m a child of scousers with an unplaceable, maybe para-northern accent, and a descendant of settlers both within Europe and Aotearoa New Zealand. I have a PhD, an MBE, and I own my home. What dimension of anti-racism can I possibly live in? I’ve led the doctoral programme at a major London conservatoire, set up a large UK private care home music therapy service, taught music therapy for years in Asia, and I identify as neuro-typical. I’ve published a monograph, chapters, papers, editorials, blogs. 

What dimension of anti-racism can I take up space in, if I also take up so much space in this professional realm?

Certainly, what am I doing trying to put my voice out into the world? A large part of me thinks that people like me should shut up and listen for a good while. How many kinds of silence are there, I then think. My old legal brain (yes, to add to my list, my first real job was as a City commercial lawyer) tells me that silence denotes consent. So if I stay silent in the face of white imperialist capitalist patriarchy, I’m not resonating with the anti-racist forces, I’m resisting them. 

But if I speak - and especially if I publish - am I not taking up time, data, profile or space that should rightly be given to marginalised voices? Is this me being a white saviour by speaking, or a white saviour by not speaking? 

So I think this is one reason I’m writing to you. Because every time I have tried to write about this from my usual platform, and into my usual academic void, my words clang about like spanners in a toolbox. What could be tools for something useful just get heavy and make a noise. I become didactic, and worse, I slip into academic discourse. 

That part is especially hard to talk about so I’m being extra careful with my spanners. Academic discourse is the air whipped up by scientific method. See, there I made a statement, and now you’re asking yourself, “Do I agree with this guy?”, or maybe, “What’s his basis for saying that”, or even, “and what’s wrong with that?”. It might help a little that I used a bit of a metaphor, and I got a bit frivolous with that ‘whipped up’ bit. So maybe I’ve side-stepped some measure of dualistic antler-locking, but still, I’ve already led us into a moment where we have to choose what realm we want to connect in. 

We could choose to go down the path of, let’s call it debate. That’s usually how academic folks like to frame things that have been accepted into the realm of research or scholarship. Here’s my problem with that: I don’t think anti-racism resides in the realm of debate. Even the mighty James Baldwin, Rest in Power, showed us this, albeit by being beyond godlike in his handling of racist oppression within the epistemology of the oppressor.

OMG I said epistemology. I get very itchy when music therapy leaders write about ‘EDIB issues’, or ‘issues of diversity’. Of course on the one hand, within one manner of speaking, diversity and anti-racism are issues. They are huge issues. Some might say they are the only issues worth talking about. But for folks like me, folks who by some accident of birth and nurture are slap bang in the core of imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy as bell hooks would say it, ‘issues' risk being just playthings. When you are positioned in such a way that you occupy the default neutral position, the benchmark, the main optic, as folks like me do, ‘issues’ become matters - at best - of managing priorities. People who are of Global Majority ethnicities, who experience marginalisation every day, who face aggressions that folks like me call ‘micro’, they don’t tend to describe this as an issue. They call it real life. 

To paraphrase an old white male, and nowadays problematic, poet, there is life lost in living; there is wisdom lost in knowledge; and there is knowledge lost in information. In other words, what for folks like me is often just information or sometimes, if we really listen, knowledge; for people who face systemic racism, health injustice, or gender-based violence, it is not even part of living, it is life itself. 

So to drag this letter kicking and screaming back to the point, how to write for a professional scholarly audience without slipping unknowing into a dimension that’s just epistemology, an esoteric word game? Addressing you helps. I think that’s because I know I can’t be high-handed or precious around you. This is not just to do with being known, and being vulnerable; it’s about presenting as a person in a time and a place. 

Apart from the professional hazard of academic dualism, another perhaps more foundational thing that happens in academic writing is that the Research Industrial Complex still prefers us to be a bit disembodied. Of course there are plenty of research traditions these days that factor in a personalised voice, from innocent techniques such as first person narrative, through personal declarations and positioning, to accounts of personal experience as an author. Davina, you modelled these so persuasively in your recent paper. 

What then happens is that the delusion of the neutral optic and the disembodied voice become associated with words like objectivity, rigour, and quality, all of which are orbiting moons around the planet of what’s called Quantitative Methodology. Leaving for another occasion the serious doubts that decades of Science Studies now cast upon this paradigm, the implication is clear: if you’re not this, then you’re being fleshy, subjective, and Qualitative. This is how imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy works. It creates dualism, hierarchy, and power. Usually those whose ducks naturally line up in the ecosystem of Qualitative Methodology don’t really see this happening either, or maybe they don’t often name it. If they do, they might engage with it on the level of epistemology, you know, make an issue of it. They might enjoy having a scrap about words like evidence, or validity, but this is really a storm within the same teacup of talking.  

I’m trying to hang on to the question I had when I started this letter, which was, what dimension of anti-racism can I take up space in, if I take up so much space in this professional realm? 

And I think that writing in this way, ie., to you, has helped me find something. 

Dismantling the core of imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy is not an epistemological project. It’s not something we do (only) in the realm of debate, logic or discussion. I can’t escape the feeling that for white people or folks like me to ‘debate’ or ‘discuss’ equality or diversity as an ‘issue’ is grotesque. 

What is demanded of me is a shift from word-based concepts to action-based being: from epistemology to ontology. Within our professional landscape this means I can’t only write, not even about my actions, but I have to acknowledge that the cosmology in which this writing sits is a construction of my own white supremacist conditioning. If I leave behind my acquired binary of Qualitative and Quantitative, I sit with the reality of indigenous participatory knowledge systems that pre-exist the European ‘enlightenment’ by thousands of years. I sit with art knowledge systems that transcend linear processes. And I recognise the work of theory that can gain so much from being undisciplinary in its being.

What’s beyond the Research Industrial Complex is really a gift economy of knowing. The gift of Arts research is translation, from one form of knowing to another. The gift of Descriptive research is interpretation, refining empathy and advocacy. The gift of Experimental research is evidence, which is useful rhetoric. The gift of Participatory research is ownership, by all, for all. And the gift of Theory research is an imagination unlimited by disciplines. This is how to be adept with our knowledge. 

I didn’t know that this piece was going to end up being about gifts, but it’s no surprise either. 

The sun is shining. My dogs are hungry. I need a cuppa. 

See you all soon.

Stuart