Motown’s Black ownership and polished image directly rebutted degrading entertainment tropes

Evidence

But perhaps the most crucial aspect of Motown, for all that would come after, is that it was a Black-owned company that made stars of Black people. Gordy founded Motown with the mission of making its artists the most desired and most respected people in the country. He presented his artists with a sense of polish, decorum, and self-possession that would have struck anyone who beheld them on American Bandstand or The Ed Sullivan Show as wholly unlike the servants and fools that had tended to enliven and degrade American entertainment. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1086

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hip-hop authenticity claims encode a depoliticised acceptance of capitalist reality — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1536