Letter to the Community from Davina Vencatasamy & Suzannah Scott-Moncrieff
Davina Vencatasamy & Suzannah Scott-Moncrieff
Most of us will never have the opportunity to see or hear the authors whose books or articles we read in the privacy of our homes and classrooms. So when we get to see authors in the flesh, what do we do when their scholarly persona and written words fail to match their in-person presentation? Is it fair to expect a person who writes about the theoretical to act in line with their thinking? And how do we make sense of and continue to cite the person’s work, without referring to our different lived experience of them in flesh and body, and how in turn must it inform our overall critical assessment and understanding of their written work?
Below is a description of one such theoretician and music therapy scholar, and the response of two music therapists in the UK to the person’s “expert” address at an international music therapy conference. We recognise that we hold this individual to a higher standard than we might hold others who are not leaders or researchers in their area of expertise. We also acknowledge that, like us, they are human, with frailties and capacities for mistakes and harm. The compassion we might feel does not negate the harm experienced, nor our right to offer this critique and description of our embodied, felt response to the content.
Positioning ourselves:
Davina positions herself as a Brown British African female with indentured Indian ancestry. She is able-bodied, cis-gendered and queer. She is a music therapist and is currently undertaking a PhD in Expressive Therapies at Lesley University in Boston MA, USA. She is researching equity, diversity, race and power dynamics in therapy spaces and is developing as an activist in issues pertaining to anti-oppression.
Suzannah is a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied woman, with lived experiences of madness. She is a music therapist in private practice, a GIM practitioner and trainer with the Institute for Music and Consciousness, and has been a lecturer at New York University and Queen Margaret University in Scotland. She is committed to anti-racism and anti-oppression in her therapy work, her teaching, and the methods she employs and trains others in, including an anti-colonial examination of Guided Imagery and Music. She recognises that she is afforded certain privileges and positions of power due, in part, to her skin colour, her surname, her perceived class, and her accent.
We use an uppercase letter for Black and Brown when describing people and experiences and use a lower case letter for white to address the power imbalance and decentralise whiteness.
Our response is visceral and somatic; it involves shaking our heads, feeling the heat of anger in our bodies, laughing as a way to release our tension and as a way to feel bonded to one another. Our response is emotional - we feel disbelief, anger, dissociation, grief, confusion, even curiosity and wonder; words come tumbling out of our mouths, fuelled by our frustration and our tiredness at encountering this situation once again. Endless questions are asked; we desire to have voices, to ‘speak to power’; to disrupt, to be loud, and to make waves.
Simultaneously, I (Suzannah) get in touch with feelings of hypocrisy and a sense of being an imposter - who am I to critique this person? We discuss: should we respond? How do we respond? Are we allowed to say what we want to say? If we ‘call out’ actions that we view as harmful, are we, simultaneously, tethering ourselves to the very thing that we’re trying to disentangle from: binaries, rigidity, being ‘knowing’ over ‘unknowing’, superiority, intelligibility etc.? What might it mean to dance with the powers that be, and this troubling experience, in a way that doesn’t reduce the other person or us to this moment?
This writing is the outcome of shared anger, many discussions, evening meetings after work and after the children are in bed, WhatsApp chats, shared google docs, writing in spare moments between work sessions and other responsibilities, as well as making music together. Time and effort has gone into generating written words as a response. We ask ourselves why we are doing this, and who it serves. We wonder whether we are able to write this without imbricating ourselves in the very thing that we wish to dismantle. We take to heart Audrey Lorde’s provocation about the impossibility of using the master’s tools to dismantle his house, and understand our limitations as embroiling us in the very supremacy we wish to turn away from.
Even after reflection, writing and reflecting on our writing, we are not sure we have achieved our aim. Even our positionality statements, which we believe are necessary in order to name the places and experiences from which we speak, are limited in that they do not speak to the multiplicities, the changing natures, the relational and embodied becoming-together that is also true of us. So, we strive to say something, to ‘stay with the trouble,’ because we believe, simply, that silence upholds the harm, and being with discomfort, together, is the only way forward. So we invite you to feel uncomfortable with us.
The details and our critique:
This international conference is a triennial-event that brings together music therapists from all over the world. The conference event is a session centring Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in music therapy. The person is a respected visionary and a commonly cited name in this area, and one of five presenters in the session.
The presenter provides a land acknowledgement and positions themselves geographically. They do not otherwise position themselves despite implications that they are minoritized in some way.
We find their lack of personal positionality problematic and confusing. The need to understand the presenter’s context in relation to their subject matter might be argued to be central when speaking about race and social injustice. Despite insinuating that their positionality places them as belonging to a marginalised group, it is only through further research that we know that they have positioned themselves, in recently published writing, as white, cisgendered, heteronormative, able-bodied, and university-educated.
However, as we don’t know this when we’re watching them, we feel increasingly uncomfortable with the confusion we feel around their identity; when they speak about carrying on the work of a revered indigenous scholar, we ask each other if they are in fact also an indigenous person? We have since considered elements of their presentation as a form of ‘white fragility’ and wonder if they were perhaps purposefully choosing to avoid positioning themselves as white in order to align themselves more closely with the marginalised people they are speaking about.
The lack of clarity left me (Davina), as a person of colour, feeling decentralised and unable to fully focus on the content of the presentation, instead searching for an insight into which epistemological perspective they were drawing their conclusions from. It left us both with deep feelings of discomfort at the seeming fetishization of the minoritized position; we wonder how we might have experienced this presentation differently had the person’s positions of privilege been acknowledged.
They have 15 minutes. The presenter focuses their time on listing their own work and expressing upset that people do not cite their work more frequently. One of their co-authored articles lists them as primary author; they laugh as they admit that they only edited the article and that the second author did all the writing.
It is our perception that this person shows a lack of humility and an inability to be unsettled and vulnerable in facing their own privilege and their potential for doing harm. We identify their fortification of their legacy as a kind of tight hold on power and legitimacy; seeking to name and own things is white supremacy in action. There is a wider issue regarding those in positions of power in academia taking first authorship for work that might belong to a student or newer professional; usually it isn’t so explicitly and publicly stated, but we feel discouraged with the injustice of this kind of practice, especially during a presentation that claims to be concerned with interrogation of power dynamics.
The presenter claims origination and ownership of a term that is common in many areas of scholarly and social endeavour, to which they added the words “music therapy”.
We find great difficulty in this person’s taking credit for the creation of this term, and implying ownership. A cursory search does indeed show that they were the first author to add “music therapy” to this already common phrase. However, they are not the first to think and write about this subject in music therapy; another music therapist had earlier published using this same term (without ‘naming’ and ‘owning’ it) in a newsletter that this presenter would have read. The claimed ownership of any languageing that originates most likely from the scholarship and activism of oppressed people, parallels a process of scholarly oppression and citational injustice.
The presenter ends with a song utilising the Blues idiom about “systemic oppression,” but without demonstrating an understanding of that phrase. They acknowledge that the Blues is a Black art form before they sing and play it.
Use of this form with only a cursory acknowledgment of its origins is lacking in cultural humility. The presenter sings a song (with original lyrics) without interrogating how the use of this Black art form might impact listeners in Black bodies. Our understanding of cultural appropriation is the use of an art form or intellectual property that is not related to one’s own culture, without respect and for personal gain. The presenter’s song lyrics demonstrate an ignorance about the meaning of systemic oppression, and underline the tokenistic gesture of the performance. In addition, the lyrics position the presenter in the first person, singing as the voice of the ‘oppressed’.
The infantilization of the Blues as an art form, and the simplistic nature of the words, conveys a deeper issue regarding how systemic oppression is not only sorely misunderstood but can be diminished or minimised. The presenter reduces the meaning of “systemic oppression” to ‘not being liked’, which is insulting and harmful; systemic racism and oppression is beyond individual bigotry, and rooted in the very systems that we all participate in such as our educational institutions, our justice systems, our banking systems, and our political bodies. The presenter appropriated an art form borne from the pain, hardship and suffering of people in Black and Brown bodies, and used it as a vehicle to mischaracterize and reduce systemic oppression to a caricature of itself. The song demonstrates a coloniality and appropriation of the experience of “the oppressed”.
In conclusion:
When we watched this presentation, we were both struck by what we perceived as the presenter’s need to promote their work, their need to be recognised, and their need to be referenced; it exposed their attachment to legacy. We saw someone who we had held in high regard as one of the leading figures in EDI in music therapy, show a self-aggrandising side of themselves which cannot be unseen, unheard or unknown.
We are left with anger to process, alongside disappointment, grief, and a feeling of mistrust in the prior work that this individual (and others) have produced. But, beyond them and the ways we’ve been unsettled by their presentation, we are tired of negotiating spaces of leadership in the music therapy field that are characterised by a lack of humility, a defensiveness to change, tokenistic wordplay, and a clinging to legitimacy. We write this critique and response not out of a need to harm or shame but instead, to shine a true spotlight on how positions of power and oppression work in practice on a daily basis, and on how this can make others feel.