ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the book's general thesis: music studies activism, BLM rhetoric aside, lacks what is needed to address the Racial Justice/Artistic Justice imperative confronting the field—and to render it a catalyst for broader arts-driven change. The chapter foreshadows three distinct lapses in the conversation. The first is limited penetration to the roots of these crises. The second involves limited future visioning and notable absence of celebratory, evolutionary thinking. This lapse results in a deficit narrative that, albeit unwittingly, continues to disparage Black American Music (BAM) and other non-Eurocanonic music, thus leading to musical racism. The third is music in higher education's failure to address BAM as more than a token in addition to existing models. The aim of this book is to prepare readers to embark on a journey of atypical candor and analytical precision as together we attempt to unravel the multi-tiered Structure of Musical Racism.
