Ever since 1920s marketers categorized some discs as race records and others as hillbilly American music genres have been constructed around race. That's true today of indie rock and indie music, genre designations that are occupied almost entirely by white musicians. "In indie rock, white is the norm," Sarah Sahim wrote last week in a Pitchfork about "The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie." She later added, "I can count on one hand the prominent performers in the independent scene that look like me."
Sahim argues that there are so few artists of color in indie because of "overt and covert expressions of racism." She points to a petition calling for the Glastonbury music festival to replace Kanye West as a headliner with a "rock band"—which is code, Sahim rightly argues, for "a white artist." When you're an artist of color and you see indie fans signing petitions like that—with 132,000 signatures, at last count—you're going to get the message that you're not welcome in indie.
One way that indie maintains its whiteness, then, is by telling people of color to go away. But the fact that "rock" can be code for "white" suggests that genre whiteness is not just a matter of discouraging artists of color. Genres like rock and indie are for many people defined by whiteness—that is, white skin becomes the genre marker, rather than the music itself. There are few artists of color in the indie scene because artists of color who make what could be called "indie music" get classified as something else.
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