Labeling Black music as ‘Black’ actually intensified white desire for it

Evidence

After all, it wasn’t Black music that Motown’s founder and chief architect, Berry Gordy, had envisioned. He wanted what Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk wanted: to make American music. Jazz artists of previous generations had strived, for years, to redefine the all-purpose “American” label, only to realize that their Blackness had been made incompatible with Americanness. The white inventors of race understood that in order for them to remain triumphant atop the mountain, somebody else had to stay put at its feet. But we’re talking about paradoxes here. Conscripting jazz to the category of “Black music” just made white people all the hungrier for it. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1079

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s reframing thesis about Black contributions being foundational to American culture rather than peripheral — Black music labeled non-American simultaneously becomes more desired.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the paradox of segregation-and-appetite plays out in cultural appropriation across genres — from jazz to hip-hop to K-pop.