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Trouble Every Day

Posted by wazoo on August 18, 2013 at 21:29:41:
Frank Zappa once penned words (in the song referenced in the subject line of this post) that express how I often feel - "I'm not black, but there's a whole lots of times I wish I could say I'm not white."

By a lucky happenstance, Dave Brubeck ended up playing music during WWII rather than going to the front with a rifle. When he returned to the U.S. with his bandmates, they went to a diner in Texas that refused to serve the black members of his band – men who risked life and limb in the service of freedom in a foreign land were the victims of bigotry in their own. It's a shameful attitude.

I'd like to think the words which gave rise to this thread were not intended as a racial insult, but the very words 'people of color' bother me (by virtue of the origin of the term 'colored people', of which 'people of color' is a form (besides, all of us have colored skin – pink is a color too :-)). Once upon a time, I played tenor sax in a jazz band. Had it not been for the innovative brilliance of so many black musicians (and I never came close to having the chops of such giants as Dizzy Gillespie), I wonder what sort of music we would have played. Many of those fine musicians came from ghettos – Satchmo grew up in one of the worst areas of New Orleans and who would dare to call him anything but a musical genius?

Will we humans ever expunge xenophobia from our psyche? In terms of modern music, there's both excellence and complete trash to be found from people of any color our skin can have. I'm not really sure what JA could/should have done beyond removing the offensive text – at least, in public. This thread gives vivid evidence of the volatile nature of openly discussing this topic. Perhaps, 'sweeping it under the rug' (again, in public) was the judicious choice.