American music achieved racial integration that society itself never did

Evidence

The ongoing disputes over whose stuff is whose obscures a more important irony: music has midwifed the only true integration this country has known. Minstrelsy’s nonconsensual impersonations hog the headlines because it was the start of American popular culture as we still know it. But the history of American music also effervesces with work made by white people alongside Black people. It’s rich with white artists who worked in Black traditions with admiration and respect, and features the occasional Black artist who, understanding the preference in certain corners of the marketplace for sanitized editions of their songs, counted the money as white artists rode Black music up the charts. Bobby and Shirley Womack’s “It’s All Over Now” wasn’t a big hit until the Rolling Stones made it one in 1964; Womack complained until he got his first royalty check. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1137