Playing The Race Card

Happy Labor Day, all! Everyone nicely recovered from their State Fair food coma and ready to dive back into the real world? Excellent. Me, too. So let's start the fall with a thorny topic I've been meaning to write about for quite a while.

The issue of race in America's classical music industry is an omnipresent embarrassment that few musicians like to talk about. Orchestras tend to be made up largely of highly educated individuals who consider themselves extremely open-minded. Many musicians volunteer their skills to inner city schools, and some go out of their way to offer affordable lessons to kids who can't afford the going rate. And yet, nearly every American orchestra remains a sea of Caucasian and Asian faces, with African-Americans and Hispanics a glaring rarity.

Now, it would be easy to chalk this up to institutional racism, just as the lack of women in orchestras until shockingly recent times was a result of deliberately exclusionary policies. But it's not that simple: nearly every American orchestra now holds its auditions behind a privacy screen and identifies candidates only by a number, so that the audition committee cannot (theoretically) know who is playing. And while the advent of the screen nicely fixed the gender problem, it hasn't done anything much to add more musicians of color to the ranks.

Conventional wisdom among musicians is that the racial imbalance in our industry is a direct result of the racial achievement gap in America's schools. Public schools in poverty-stricken districts (which, of course, tend to have higher percentages of black and Latino students) frequently have no music program at all, or a severely underfunded and understaffed one at best. And when you consider that it's not at all unusual for string players, in particular, to begin taking lessons at the age of 4 or 5, a lack of easy access to instruments and lessons can kill a potential musician's career before s/he leaves elementary school.

There's also a distinct social aspect to music that might feel exclusionary not just to blacks and Latinos, but to any family that doesn't fit the usual demographic. I grew up participating in youth music programs that were centered in major cities, but nearly every kid in the programs came from the suburbs, and from families with money. My suburban public school had its racial diversity bussed in from Boston, but the Saturdays I spent in the heart of the city playing in orchestras and string quartets were, for the most part, lily-white. It would never have occurred to any of us to suggest that people with darker skin than ours couldn't play music every bit as well as we did, but neither did it occur to us to wonder why they weren't doing exactly that.

Because music takes a lifetime to master, it's very easy for all of us to point the finger backward at school boards, politicians, and even parents who choose not to expose their kids to music. But as Peter Dobrin pointed out in a blistering column in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month, that sort of buck-passing lets those of us in the industry off far too easy. "It's time to stop saying the talent isn't there, and to stop citing the objectivity of the audition screen. The only thing the screen hides is the audition process, and it's not even doing a very good job of that anymore."

As I read Dobrin's larger point, he's suggesting that orchestras won't start showing more racial diversity until they are forced to by some mechanism other than a blind hiring process. So imagine if the orchestra business suddenly instituted an aggressive affirmative action program (leaving aside the thorny issue of whether the current Supreme Court would allow such a program to stand) and began giving preference to black and Latino candidates. Musicians would scream bloody murder, of course, because this business is supposed to be entirely meritocratic. But wouldn't such a system immediately give the largest organizations in the music world a vested interest in improving the quality and availability of music education programs for underprivileged kids?

In the early years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, business owners could plausibly claim that the reason they continued to hire whites at a far, far higher rate than blacks was because of a lack of proper education and skills training in the black community. Yet, since the entire system had been set up to keep blacks at a disadvantage, a system had to be devised to force people and governments to change that system in order for the situation to improve. Simply saying blacks were equal to whites wasn't enough to improve their access to upper levels of society.

I'm not suggesting that a system of racial quotas for orchestras would fix the problem in our business. But there's no question that it is a disgrace for an industry that spends so much time talking about our value to the wider community to still, in 2009, be less racially diverse than your average corporate boardroom or Congressional subcommittee.