Honors 391AH Discovery Seminar Spotlight: This is America: Race and Racism in American Popular Music
By Leila Metres
Content
When I was looking at the options for Honors 391AH Discovery Seminars, there was one that stood out—This is America: Race and Racism in American Popular Music taught by Musbah Shaheen, a Syrian-born assistant professor in the College of Education at UMass. I’ve always been drawn to social justice-oriented discussion, and I thought that this would be a good opportunity to take a course that’s a bit different from my main area of study.
Shaheen brought a warm and friendly personality to the class, encouraged us to share our perspectives, and challenged us to complicate our thinking.
Shaheen started the course by introducing music as a reflection of identity, then as a form of culture, and finally as a tool of resistance. One of the first activities in the class is the mapping of music genres, which helps students better understand genres and how they’re related. Shaheen shared that one class claimed to really hate country music, but things changed for them after doing this activity.
“Country music is deeply connected to American culture, deeply connected to the history of race and racism in America, deeply connected to the legacy of slavery, giving us all of the genres that we know and love today,” Shaheen said. “We thought we were talking about country music, but what we were actually talking about is history—the things that we cannot change about our past and that we continue to live with right now.”
The Structure of the Course
Shaheen said the purpose of Honors 391AH courses is to “discover and develop research skills.” Throughout this course, we watched music videos, listened to songs, read about cultural influences on music, and had powerful discussions about race and identity. At the end of the course, we chose our own area of interest to analyze through songs and make an annotated bibliography about. I chose to focus on songs where LGBTQ artists processed and redefined their relationships to religion.
When I picked out the songs for this project, I focused on the songs with lyrics that stood out to me the most. None of these songs were new to me, but it was really interesting to take a closer look at the lyrics and figure out how to write about what made them so significant. I found that the more I wrote, the more I discovered about the songs. For example, an artist like Semler still classifies themself as a gospel artist that praises God while revising the traditional Christian narratives around gender and sexuality. I learned a lot about reading between the lines and listening more critically to music throughout this course.
One of the core components of the class is writing a two-page reflection paper each week about the readings and/or class discussions. At first, I thought that writing two pages every week would be a lot of work, but I realized that it wasn’t as scary as I had thought. One of Shaheen’s goals was to informalize writing and allow it to be a space where students could unmask some of the self-censorship that happens in class.
“I’m not looking for form,” Shaheen said, “I’m looking for exploration.”
Photo: Jack Bertling
Having Difficult Conversations About Race and Identity
One of Shaheen’s areas of research is the impact of college education on students. He understands the impact of talking in the classroom about heavy topics. He uses music as a trick or hack to get students comfortable with breaching potentially difficult and divisive subject matter.
“We’re seeing a lot of tension around ideas like race, gender, sexuality, and all those aspects of life coming into the forefront and causing great division within Americans. And I think the consequence of that is that now students want to stay friends with people. We don’t want to disturb the peace,” Shaheen said.
Although Shaheen is not a trained musician, he is trained in having conversations about race. His research on self-censorship in college students has informed the way he approaches this class.
“To challenge a perspective, that perspective must first be expressed,” he explained.
Our perspectives were challenged during a class conversation on a Kendrick Lamar performance about police brutality. After watching the video, Shaheen encouraged students to share one word about what they were feeling.
One person spoke up and said that they felt sad because their mom was a cop and that wasn’t how they saw her or her field. This encouraged another student with a parent in the police force to share a similar sentiment. In that moment, students feeling safe enough to share their perspectives added a level of complexity to the discussion. This highlighted important opportunities for perspective-taking and empathy.
For students who may be considering taking this course, Shaheen warns that it won’t all be watching Beyoncé music videos—although there will be some of that.
There will be moments that make you critically reflect on uncomfortable topics. There will be difficult conversations and opportunities to learn from different perspectives. But overall, if you’re curious about where music came from, why, and by whom, this course is a great place to start exploring that.
Featuring
Leila Metres
