In the wake of the global mass protests against systemic racism and police brutality in 2020, US institutions have undergone what has been described as a “racial reckoning”—to decidedly mixed results. Music academia has not been excepted from these conversations, which were already underway in part because of an earlier disciplinary flashpoint: the controversy around Philip Ewell's 2019 Society for Music Theory keynote address, much discussed since, even in such venues as the New York Times.2 Roughly concurrently, Loren Kajikawa has published important arguments about the persistence and structures of white supremacy in collegiate music education generally, showing how Ewell's critiques are not limited to the academic discipline of music theory but are rather more foundational.3 In fact, Black music scholars have been making many of the same points for years: Ewell and Kajikawa's essays join longstanding conversations, research, and activism by scholars such as Dwight Andrews,...
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