Music education ‘remains inherently racist,’ scholars say

Music education programs in the United States “serve a White-normative, Eurocentric model,” and the admissions process for those programs “remains inherently racist,” according to a recent academic paper.

The paper, titled “Disrupting Racism in Music Education: Conceptualizing Admissions Processes Through the State and the War Machine,” was authored by Erika Knapp and Whitney Mayo, who identify as “White scholars doing anti-racist work.” They wrote their paper using an “anti-racist lens drawn from Critical Race Theory.”

Knapp (pictured, left) is a music education professor at the University of North Texas and Mayo (pictured, right) teaches music at the University of North Dakota.