I’d like to start by cheering on all the work linguists have done in order to properly respect actual differences between languages and not be racist and weird. Big shoutout to recognizing that AAVE is its own dialect of english and isn’t just broken english.
What other fields have done a good job with not being racist?
Ethnomusicologists generally refuse to teach non western music using western notation. I also know a local drum program whose teachers don’t allow western notation in their African drum classes. It’s all aural tradition, more or less trying to replicate the way it was taught to them.
Yeah those people are based as hell (from what I know)
I’m really curious if there is resistance to at least having some kind of notation for something like african drum? Does it already exist?
I’ve seen a notation that almost looks like a ticked number line with different markings for different articulations, but I’m not sure how much it derives from traditional notation. I’m not an ethnomusicologist or even a drummer, so my understanding is based on a handful of sessions I’ve sat in on and a friend of mine who used to teach hand drums.
The one time I sat in on an intro group, I asked if I was going to need sheet music and instructor just told me to use my ears. A kid who played more classical music and was used to sightreading panicked a little bit at this and instructor just reassured him and said “I’ve taught deaf students to hear the rhythm in their hands. I promise I can teach you to hear it with your ears”. That seemed to put that to rest lol
A lot of non Western drum traditions aren’t notated because they’re literally too complex or idiosyncratic compared to Western music to make any sense or be of any real use.
Indian percussion often changes meter so frequently that notating it poses a lot of challenges,and the actual rhythms tend to be so complex on top of also being tonal that it would be more effort than just learning it by ear. https://youtu.be/wYihZHXees8
This kind of thing is traditionally taught by singing the rhythms in a set of coded syllables and then translating it on to the drum.
A lot of non-Western music literally can’t be notated in the Western style. Not that it would stop racists, but at a certain point if you actually care about the material you have to admit you’re not going to make traditional Japanese music fit a 12-note scale no matter what you try.
Japanese don’t have a skull shape which permits the clearly objectively superior 12 tet scale therefore we must introduce their music to methods that will help elevate it.
Sort of related, but I like singing sacred harp music which has many modifications to it to make it more “musical” (adding lyrics and harmonies) and it kinda frustrates me cause it does kinda miss the point.
A lot of non-Western music literally can’t be notated in the Western style
BASED
the biggest con job in history is a bunch of smelly barbarian Anglos convincing (through force, probably) Indians that Indian culture is primitive
2000 FUCKING YEARS AGO Indian rhythm was more complex than what Westerners have
Paleontology is at least getting there. The history of the field is absolute shit, and that has set a precedent, but the conferences I’ve been to have all been pretty open about those problems and trying to fix them including by talking with minority paleontologists, rather than just having a board of white people trying to fix it.
There’s a long history of geology being done by rich white men. And then paleontology has a history of white men, with interests in evolution. So the long term history includes many eugenicists.
On top of that there’s history with scientific colonialism. A German court just ruled that they can keep fossils smuggled out of Brazil for example.
And then there’s the lasting history of being a science with institutions founded explicitly by and for rich white guys. Like engineering or whatever has financial gain and generally always had, so there’s a broader section of the general population that can enter that field. Rocks early on were only really studied by rich white dudes (with few exceptions) because it was a place to spend excess money. This, plus field work being mandatory has led to the geosciences being essentially an old boys club, at least up until the GI bill (in the US) and there were still problems with that, which generally excluded minorities in an already somewhat excluding field. So out of the sciences it is the most institutionally racist intended or not. But they are being self aware about it & will hopefully see better conditions in the next few years.
Ahhh that makes sense. I had herd of the scientific colonialism thing in terms of archeology and such, but I never really thought about that in terms of other similar fields. And geology, yeah that’s a white science. Being self aware is more than a lot of fields are doing cough cough economics cough
