John Spilker, Opportunities for Care, Repair, and Equity: Discovering Music in Research on Racial Injustice
This presentation is rooted in Bryan Stevenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative for truth and reconciliation around the legacy of slavery. On September 12, 2017, Stevenson visited Nebraska Wesleyan University and presented four practices from his book Just Mercy: 1) get proximate to the problem, closer to groups and people who are suffering and neglected in their suffering, 2) change narratives that sustain inequality, 3) stay hopeful, because hopelessness is the enemy of justice, and 4) be willing to do uncomfortable things. Stevenson’s presentation inspired me to undertake sustained research and teaching on racial justice. My work was informed by several visits to the EJI’s sites, including the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and attendance at the EJI’s Classical Music Convenings in 2023 and 2024. This presentation documents ways in which music was key to racialized dehumanization, torture, and even death—a striking, unexpected discovery that invites people to care more deeply by naming music’s role in racial violence, a form of truth-telling, and noting opportunities for racial reconciliation. Three case studies detail the ways in which music took center stage in acts of racial injustice. First, W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk documents racialized dehumanization at a classical music concert. Second, an opera house in Livermore, Kentucky was used for a lynching. Third, blackface minstrelsy shows at my grandmother’s high school in Canton, Ohio from 1939 to 1943 reveal dehumanization in performance practices and music education repertoire.
About the presenter:
John Spilker-Beed is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the Gender & Sexuality Studies program at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He has presented scholarship at the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Society for Music Theory, and the Association of American Colleges & Universities. His publications appear in American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and the book Teaching Difficult Topics: Reflections from the Undergraduate Music Classroom (University of Michigan Press, 2024.) Dr. Spilker-Beed’s book, co- authored with Colleen Renihan and Trudi Wright, is titled Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024). Dr. Spilker will be joined by Rev. Dr. Kirstie J. Engel, Stephen Engel, and Elijah Spilker-Beed.