“To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

Background and Context: Inspired by a photograph of the groundbreaking playwright Lorraine Hansberry that appeared in the New York Times following her unanticipated death in 1965, Nina Simone, pianist, singer-songwriter, and civil rights activist, carefully crafted “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a song that later became the anthem of the 1970s Black Power Movement. Like Hansberry, Simone sought to encourage cultural and ethnic pride among young African Americans who found themselves at the crossroads of an identity crisis and a national dismissal of their existence, both funded by racism. Today, African Americans attending predominantly White institutions (PWIs) continue to grapple with these challenges. Purpose/Objective/Research Question or Focus of Study: For this study, we aim to amplify the lived experiences and ontologies of Black music education doctoral students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) and to identify and confront racialized structures, including dominant narratives that suggest Black folk and their epistemologies are inferior. We seek to add to current scholarship written by Black scholars about Black experiences, while also honoring Black music educators, music teacher educators, and scholars who have come before us and who will follow by speaking truth to power or rather “telling it like it is.” Research Design: We employ storytelling, a key tenet of critical race theory (CRT), to share our experiences of grappling with racialized encounters in four predominantly White doctoral music education programs, highlighting how these experiences impacted our Ph.D. journeys and how we wrestled with them. To examine our experiences, we use CRT in its entirety alongside musical renditions of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” by Nina Simone, Donny Hathaway, The Heptones, and Aretha Franklin. Data detailing our experiences were collected through five 90-minute semistructured focus group conversations. Using CRT a priori codes and emergent codes, we delved into our narratives and how our intersectional identities along the lines of race and gender compounded the oppression we endured. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our research suggests that Black doctoral students in music education encounter a wealth of racialized structures along their journeys to degree completion. Not only did we grapple with identity politics, but we also wrestled with our White professors’ and peers’ “imagined cultural superiority” (Calmore, 1992, p. 2131). Among our efforts to realize our pathways forward, resistance and counterspace became salient for us in seizing our liberation and defying racism. Because PWIs continue to evade their responsibility in confronting their own racist social order, we fear that African Americans and other students of color will have no choice but to continue to negotiate spaces that are racially hostile and unjust. When PWIs decide to truly become antiracist, their agendas will include, but will not be limited to, reimagining admission and audition policies and practices, dismantling curricula that propagate the functions of Whiteness as property, and terminating racist social agents.