Shared musical culture can organize racism out of youth social life

Evidence

The engagement with black culture also led in some circumstances to a political opening with regard to issues of multiculturalism and racism. Jones (1988) develops this approach in his analysis of white experiences of black youth culture. In his study of a section of Birmingham’s youth he shows how reggae music provides a site where dialogues between black and white people can occur. He reports: They are visible everywhere in a whole range of cross racial affiliations and shared leisure spaces; on the streets, around the games machines, in the local chip shop, in the playgrounds and parks, the dances and blues, right through the mixed rock and reggae groups for which the area has become renowned. (Jones, 1988:xiv) Here, the national chauvinism so prevalent in Britain during the 1980s, he argued, is simply redundant. The fact that such a phenomenon existed at all pointed to the emergence of a youthful social sphere in which racism - however fleetingly - could be organized out of social life. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2992

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Speaks to the reader’s interest in cultural practices as infrastructure — reggae scenes as ephemeral social infrastructure that temporarily suspends racism.
• XREF: connects to: Music can serve as a primary gateway into white supremacist culture — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 343