Following the Open letter from Dr. Danielle Brown, we as graduate students and faculty members of Project Spectrum and “The Scare Quotes” (a coalition of BIPOC and queer ethnomusicologists) write to stress that the time is ripe for structural change. More and more people, particularly graduate students and early-career scholars, are learning through experience that racism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, neoliberalisation, and the precarity that higher education engenders all require organizing at the grassroots and community level, in order to bring about a new order; one that is diverse, inclusive, and explicitly committed to equity and access. If we want our institutions to flourish as ethical and sustainable spaces of knowledge, growth, creativity, and community, then our field’s leaders must value the input and unique wisdom of marginalized scholars and must enact policies based on that value. We, as junior scholars of color and white allies, write to share our experiences of the culture of SEM from such perspectives and suggest actions that can significantly impact the sustainability and inhabitability of our field’s institutions.

On the eve of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 65th anniversary, we must reflect honestly on whether the Society has made enough progress in that timespan toward equity and inclusion, toward de-centering hegemonic value systems, and toward drawing the marginalized out of the margins and truly learning from their experiences and scholarship. The Society has changed in the last decade, as evidenced by the projects promoted by the Diversity Action Committee and the Crossroads Section on Diversity and Difference (in addition to the labor carried out locally in the Society’s Sections), such as the travel and research awards that encourage student participation, including the Ric Trimillos Annual Meeting Travel Award, The Gertrude Rivers Robinson Annual Meeting Travel Award, The Deborah Wong Research & Publication Award, The Day of Ethnomusicology, and others. Some general awards also boost young scholars’ careers and encourage some innovative practices, such as the Jaap Kunst Prize for novel scholars, the Charles Seeger Prize for student papers, and the Judith McCulloh Public Sector Award. In the absence of demographics data on these and other awards, we can only speculate on the impact they have had on the lives and careers of young BIPOC scholars, LGBTQIA+ scholars, disabled scholars1, gender nonconforming & nonbinary scholars, and scholars who are not affiliated with an academic institution within the Society (see our analysis of these and other awards in our list of targeted actions at the end of the document). Thus, while we recognize that change has taken place, and are certainly heartened by the efforts of some committees, awards, and sections, our work is far from done.

This Society is at a historical crossroads, where an open dialogue devoted to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion should be welcomed. In the absence of reliable moderation of the SEM-L listserv, these debates have proliferated through social media and through other unmoderated channels of communication. This is an unsustainable method of governance that counteracts the pressing issues that SEM 2014 Membership Survey Report reported as necessary to the “diversification of SEM membership (including international participation), diversification of scholarship in the Annual Meeting and journal, and the broadening international dialogue.” The data in this Survey (see excerpted tables below) show that between 2002, 2008 and 2014, the Society has seen only a slight, steady increase in the percentage of members identifying as “Hispanic” or “Latino” while numbers among other non-white members have either shown a downward trend or fluctuated. While there has been a decrease in the number of members marking “Euro-American'' on their demographic questionnaires, in 2014, many of the 9.4% marking “Other” entered such terms as “white,” “Caucasian,” “Jewish-American,” or specific European national groups, thereby potentially accounting for the 7% discrepancy in white membership between 2008 and 2014. This Survey also shows not only a decrease of young members among the most common graduate student age, but only a slight increase in international membership, gender variant members, and LGB & “other” identified members (notably, TGNCNB, queer, asexual, and other identifiers were left out of these surveys). These dismal numbers contradict the data gathered on the Society’s geographic areas of research, which show a dramatic increase in the study of non-North American focused musics, particularly in areas such as Asia and Latin America.

We are certain that radical and necessary change is possible in music studies. In the American Musicological Society’s recent 2017 study, to provide an example, we can see a potentially significant positive shift in their society’s demographics. As it reads, “younger members are more likely to be female, have higher numbers identifying as non-White and/or Hispanic, and are more likely to identify as LGBTQ than older members.” These results lead us to question who really benefits from participating in the SEM, and who feels they are “at home,” as Danielle Brown has highlighted. We also note that SEM’s 2014 study was never made fully available to the general membership and/or public. Both this and the lack of a concrete follow-up to this 2014 study demonstrate an inability or reluctance to address such troubling realities in our Society,

leaving us with no other option than to question its governance and take collective action.

SEM should not only conduct a follow-up survey on diversity within its membership, but also acknowledge that focusing exclusively on improving statistical “diversity metrics” is insufficient to enact meaningful change. “Improved” representation without structural transformation will not make our society more inclusive, equitable, or accessible. Addressing the crises currently facing SEM will require going beyond redressing structures that minimize change or to accommodate demographic shifts in peripheral spaces; the present juncture represents an opportunity to rethink the structure and performance of musical knowledge-production in academic settings. For example, a radical restructuring of ethnomusicological conferences and SIGs could help ethonomusicologists to overcome the fetishization of non-white peoples and cultures that still pervades the discipline, offering a possibility to counter perceptions that tokenize, marginalize and oppress BIPOC scholars. Furthermore, genuinely “decentering” white supremacist and hegemonic epistemologies along with their concomitant methodologies and discursive positions will only be effective when the Society for Ethnomusicology begins to actively create and hold space for non-white scholars; for example, the Society can commit to avoiding majority-white panels, roundtables, and keynote addresses / invited lectures.

In the many discussions that sprung up around Dr Danielle Brown’s “An Open Letter on Racism in Music Studies,” members of “The Scare Quotes” and Project Spectrum spoke with SEM members who were eager to help and open to learn how they could instigate and amplify change. We also encountered, however, a relative lack of understanding around fundamental issues regarding racism, including even overtly antagonistic questioning of grassroots organizing (such as ours) as a valid mode of political engagement. It is thus clear to us that the field of academic ethnomusicology has fallen out of step with current values and practices in public ethnomusicology and advocacy.