Abstract
In this position paper, I use auto-ethnographic approaches and case studies to explore the findings from the 2020 British Association for Music Therapy Diversity Report which highlighted the disturbing gaps in the diversity of music therapy in the United Kingdom. I focus specifically on racial issues in music therapy and the impact of Brexit as a cultural demarcation landmark in the political landscape of the United Kingdom. Throughout this article, challenging terminology and language are used to explore the systemic nature of prejudice and oppression. In the clinical examples, I attempt to denote when elements of therapeutic intervention framed by a prejudicial, Western lens can result in therapy which can be damaging. This article involves the critical discussion and use of some offensive language, including the explicit spelling of derogatory terms.
The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.
Introduction
I currently identify as a British African of Indentured Indian descent. This rather long-winded descriptor has taken 2 years to formulate, a lifetime to acknowledge and remains fluid as I discover more about my heritage and my ethnic identity as a person of colour, born and raised in the United Kingdom. In 2016, I experienced an identity crisis when the Brexit result landed. The result came as a shock mainly because I had overestimated the level of racial tolerance I believed Britain to have. I was left feeling destabilised, unsure that my motherland still accepted me. This was reflected in a report which stated that ‘the referendum result, much like Trump’s election in 2016, was a surprise. It defied both the betting markets and the polls’ (Carr, 2020: 1). My perception and fundamental understanding of the country where I was born, to which I believed I belonged, evaporated overnight. I was forced to face a reality that the colour of my skin distinguished me from my white counterparts, a reality I had vehemently denied all my life. Growing up, I had excelled at assimilating into my environment and had both consciously and unconsciously ‘whitewashed’ (Helligar, 2022: 1) myself into believing I fitted in, that I was accepted. I had worn the British badge proudly, never really knowing what that truly meant. The impact of the leave vote meant the confidence I had in my place in the world crumbled and I was left bereft; mourning the loss of identity, sense of self and a country to call mine.
My existence until that point had been hegemonised into whiteness; as a child I went to Roman Catholic schools, both independent and state-run. I lived in a white suburban area of West London which was a privilege afforded to me by my immigrant parents who came to their ‘motherland’ of England seeking their fortune and a better life, a colonial-inspired promise made over generations. They came with the belief they could be socially mobile, not fully understanding the limitations the colour of their skin would impose on them and their family. Brexit forced me to look at my ‘Brown-ness’ in the mirror to reveal a reflection of myself, not as a British citizen, but as an outsider, something which my parents worked so hard to eradicate. For the first time, I awoke to the fundamental and frankly disturbing knowledge that statistically, around half of the people I encountered in everyday life, voted for an outcome fought on the premise of racism and half-truths (and downright lies) with little regard to the actual political dogma (Moore and Ramsay, 2017).
My convoluted ethnic descriptor is not the only way I identify myself; I am a female, cis-gendered, asexual, able-bodied mother. My identity is also closely tied into being a Music Therapist. Once I had opened the door to exploring my racial identity and what it meant for me as an individual, it was inevitable that all aspects of my identity, including my professional identity, would also be subject to the same scrutiny, given facets of our identity are never mutually exclusive. In the British Association for Music Therapy’s (BAMT) diversity report based on a survey of its membership, glaring inequalities were highlighted (Langford et al., 2020). Music Therapists in the United Kingdom are predominantly white, middle class, cis-gendered and female.
The reasons for this are multifaceted and complex but are indicative of the barriers that exist to accessing this profession. In a report exploring the barriers to music education, the main culprits were broadly identified as being economic and cultural (Creech et al., 2016). Learning a musical instrument which then can open the door to a career in music historically has been expensive. With conventional Western orchestral instruments, the cost can be so high as to be exclusionary, engendering a sense of elitism. Cultural barriers also exist; music as a ‘serious’ career path is not a luxury often afforded to people of colour, where the measure of success is placed with high-paying, high-status careers such as medicine or law. These factors ensure that the likelihood of families of colour with mediocre means investing in their child’s music education is much lower, leading to a lack of representation in music. One of the consequences is the lack of availability of diverse musicians which then stems the flow into music therapy, leading to the lack of diversity within the profession. The lack of difference curtails creativity and growth (Dixon-Fyle, 2020) and can mean challenge is suppressed. Those with alternative voices can be marginalised or at the worst, silenced. Arguably, over the years, music therapy has become seen as a homogenised group, who mostly have accessed the profession through one narrow gateway, diminishing the opportunity for diversity of thought and critical challenge. This perhaps, in turn, impacts our core ability to incorporate difference and diversity in our practice, the very skill set required to be an effective Music Therapist.
Although there has been an upsurgence of the diversity discourse in the public and private sectors, within music therapy the pace of change has historically been slow. The persistent ignoring and unwillingness to tackle the question of diversity has meant that close to 90% of Music Therapists are white and privileged enough to have received private music lessons to learn their craft (BAMT, 2020). I am not suggesting there has been a conscious effort to exclude minority groups or people of colour from the profession, but cultural barriers and a lack of investment has led to a diminished understanding of why musicians of colour do not choose music therapy as a profession. In addition, the focus on Western classical paradigms and pedagogy within music therapy, and the broader scope of music education, means that the gateway becomes very narrow indeed. Historically, music therapy training courses have relied on applicants demonstrating their musical ability through achieving grades, usually associated with Western classical music training. The grade system was born from patriarchal meritocracy systems, which were built to exclude those who were unfit (Bull, 2019). Therefore, it seems that the music therapy profession has ended up fostering a culture where applicants (and potential applicants) to the training courses believe they must have met these narrow criteria to become a Music Therapist. The requirement of being able to read and write Western classical music notation perhaps has little to do with being an effective Music Therapist. Reliance on using traditional skill assessments blindly maintains well-worn oppressive systems which may simply reproduce therapists who fulfil the stereotype of being white and middle class.
In this position paper, I explore how the lack of diverse practice can impact our therapy and our clients of colour and use vignettes of clinical work to illustrate this. It also supports a shift in language from a white centralised norm by using lower case for the descriptor of ‘white’ and places the emphasis where possible by using upper case for ‘Black’ and ‘Brown’ as Appiah explored in his article in 2020. I address the importance of diversity and debunk the idea that due to the ‘multicultural’ nature of music itself, the issues have already been addressed. I have been inspired by authors such as Akala, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Ijeoma Oluo, who have been speaking about these very same issues for a long time in a wider context. This discourse has helped me understand the desperation I felt when the country I was born in, and considered my literal as well as figurative rock, could suddenly and unceremoniously rip away the acceptance I had always taken for granted.
Brexit
It is an imperfect exercise to try to trace the reasons for the Brexit vote down to a specific source – the referendum posed a binary question, yes or no, to a multifaceted issue that few voters have grappled with in detail and which referendum campaigners have reduced to emotive sound bites. The vote has been linked to nativism, economic frustration, imperialist nostalgia and just plain old racism. (Malik, 2019: 69)
As we enter an era where the United Kingdom has democratically elected itself ‘free’ from its closest European neighbours, the unmistakable truth that multiculturalism is dynamically and complexly interwoven into our society was made explicit by the Brexit campaign. A report focussing on the UK media coverage stated that ‘immigration was the most prominent referendum issue, based on the number of times it led newspaper print front pages’, and that ‘coverage of the effects of immigration was overwhelmingly negative’ (Moore and Ramsay, 2017: 9). Indeed, the report goes on to state that ‘overall, UK media coverage of the EU Referendum campaign can best be described as acrimonious and divisive’ (Moore and Ramsay, 2017: 10). Since the success of the leave campaign, people of colour have been targeted as representing the multicultural Britain that was being rejected by large sections of society. Post-Brexit rhetoric emerged on media outlets from members of the public who gained a newfound confidence to make statements such as ‘they (people of colour) don’t belong here and should go back to [their] country’ or ‘there are too many brown faces’ here (O’Brien, 2017: 1). Given that any new legislation from Brexit would affect migratory pathways from the EU, a predominantly white population, it was seemingly Britain’s undercurrent of racial intolerance that was given a chance to shine. For those people of colour born in Britain, the ferocity of the racism that emerged was a shock to many. The campaign of Brexit was fought on a racially focussed premise which gave voice to and exposed the underlying hostility festering beneath the surface of ‘multicultural’ Britain. I recall listening to a Radio 4 programme shortly after the referendum result where reporter, Sima Kotecha bravely went into ‘leave’ stronghold areas to investigate the reasons why people voted to leave. She was confronted with language I had previously assumed defunct, specifically the term ‘Paki’. It was shocking to hear hate speech of my childhood spoken out loud again and so openly on national radio. Moreover, it left me with a sense of dread and resignation; an understanding that it was I who was the fool for ever believing in a post-racial trope. It signalled a death toll for the façade Britain portrayed as being ‘tolerant’ and confirmed the suspicion that I had never been accepted or truly ‘belonged’.
Dominant narratives in literature, language and history
There have been some attempts to address race in music therapy. In her book Experiencing Race as a Music Therapist: Personal Narratives, Dr Susan Hadley (2013) compiles a narrative of race- and culture-focussed case studies, giving an overview of the difficulties that arise in therapeutic practice. This book is a useful insight into cultural considerations of a range of Music Therapists writing from their perspectives. However, on closer examination, most of the therapists have had experience of residing within their dominant castes, that is, they grew up with a community who looked as they did. There was also a distinct lack of representation from people of colour; of the 17 narratives available, 12 authors identified themselves as white, and of the others, 1 identified as having been brought up within their dominant culture until moving later in life. One author introduces themselves as being ‘. . . Japanese, and I was born in the 1980s. I spent my first 17 years in Japan and then moved to the United States’ (Hadley, 2013: 176). From this, I make my own assumption that this author is a person of colour. In Britain, identifying as British assumes whiteness. This is something to do with the dominance and centralisation of being white in a society where some of our major cities are becoming plural in its ethnicity. For me, describing myself as British inevitably needs further clarification; I must specify my colour and ethnicity (i.e. Brown British) as just being ‘British’ comes with the inevitable follow-up question of ‘but where are you really from?’. The tendency to push the colour of someone’s skin out of the picture is a common one. In Music Therapy it is particularly true when describing clients, even though, in the context of discourse around cultural and racial considerations, it can be a significant, central issue. This information can be important, not only to properly contextualise the complexities of the therapeutic material but to ensure white centralising and a ‘normalisation’ of white is not assumed. The therapist’s racial identity is as equally important as the client’s. Our tendency to marginalise the racial discourse is reflected in history pedagogy where generations have not been taught about the long legacy of colonisation, slavery, racial discrimination and appropriation that has shaped our society. This whitewashing allows for a disconnect between Britain’s contribution to the slave trade and the role that it played in the development of racial difference as a social construct. In a parallel process, pushing the colour of our client’s and/or therapist’s skin out of the picture continues to ensure that history also cannot enter the therapy space allowing a maintenance of the status quo where race is a taboo topic in music therapy.
We are born with our racial identities, but we are able to shape and grow the culture we live in. The idea of culture and race often is used interchangeably in music therapy literature resulting in cultural issues overshadowing racial ones. There are very few music therapy authors of colour in the United Kingdom. This leads to issues of race not being explored in great depth initially and an inability to hear from an appropriate critical voice with lived experience at the peer review stage. All this has culminated in a dearth of literature on racial issues in music therapy literature.
Inciting discomfort and terminology of race
The conversation around race has shifted since the murder of George Floyd in 2020. As the world entered an era of challenge and disruption caused by the pandemic, being in lockdown allowed the time and space for the spotlight to shine onto racism. In this crucible, a new generation awoke to the issues of race, inequality and disadvantage. With it came a glossary of new language that I quickly digested, not because it was the correct terminology or ‘woke’ language to use, but because these new words named experiences that had been nameless for my whole life.
As my own personal journey deepened, challenges presented themselves in further emotive terminology such as white privilege, white fragility, white saviourism, (de)colonisation, intersectionality and unconscious bias. However, the discombobulation with the deeper meanings of these terms was lifted the more I read, listened and spoke with others also doing this work. This journey of discovery was coupled with the dawning realisation that these were not simply words or ideas; they were doors, opening pathways to an exploration of self, an awakening of the unconscious into experience.
Commencing the journey was a double-edged sword; full of loss and grief from increasing awareness as well as the affirmation and connectiveness that came with being felt and heard in emergent online Black and Brown spaces created in the lockdown of the Covid pandemic. The causes of my grief were multiple; grief at the time lost at not confronting these issues while in training. There was a grief in the understanding that I had not considered my clients enough because of either my racial identity or theirs. There was a grief in recognition of opportunities that were not afforded to me because I did not ‘fit in’ or ‘I did not speak the right language’; racially charged, throwaway comments amplifying the rejection I felt due to the difference I presented. The discovery and engagement with the Black African and Asian Therapy Network provided a much-needed antidote. I had the privilege to attend a peer support group specifically for therapists with a similar indentured heritage to mine. It was a joyous experience to find a group made for me and others like me to speak out about the very same issues being raised in this article.
Although becoming being a member of BAATN has been fulfilling and exciting, I was initially filled with uncertainty. Do I want to be identified solely as a Brown therapist? Having fought so hard and so long to ‘belong’ in a white-dominated profession, was I prepared to enter and commit wholly to a new and unfamiliar space? I am not Black or Asian making this space another one where I potentially could feel as though I do not belong. I joined because I had no other choice. There were no other spaces available to me which addressed issues directly relating to race.
Questioning the power dynamics in therapy
Racism is about power. Considerations of the power dynamics in the therapy space rarely include the added complexity of the role racial power can play. Western psychoanalytical-based paradigms, which largely influence approaches in UK music therapy, stem predominantly from models of thought written by white men, for white men. Forged in a world where misogyny and racism were created as social constructs for the benefit of the powerful few, the resultant Black and Brown female perspective has been effectively silenced. Fanon (1952) explores the complexities and drivers surrounding power dynamics between Black and white more fully in his book, Black Skin, White Masks, which are applicable to the therapy space. Without understanding more of the colonial historical aspects of Western ideologies and separating it out from cultural differences, therapists have little hope of truly understanding all conscious and unconscious transgenerational traumas their client of colour brings into the space.
Traditionally, ‘psychoanalytic, behavioural, humanistic, and transpersonal psychology’ have been the ‘established four forces’ in music therapy (Stige, 2002: 38). In the United Kingdom, the use of a music-centred approach or those informed by psychoanalysis and psychodynamic theories have dominated praxis. These Western practices could be considered a parallel process with colonisation, a dominance of an ideology to the exclusion of any other models. Without a proper understanding of how different cultures and racial constructs interact with whiteness, how can we then offer only one perspective in the therapy space and expect it to ‘fit all’? As a profession, perhaps it is time for music therapy to begin to think more widely about different models of practice: those with a feminist focus, or a critical humanistic approach (Hadley and Thomas, 2018). Theories which are based on Western thinking perhaps uphold the continued centralisation of white supremacist systems.
Case-work examples
In my psychoanalytical and psychodynamic informed practice over the past 17 years, I had never applied the lens of racial disparity to my clients despite them being from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds. My Brownness had arisen occasionally within the therapeutic space, but ultimately it had always been absorbed into the wider process of what was happening in the dyadic element between client and therapist or simply brushed under the carpet. I felt unable to approach the matter, treating it as an issue of ‘self-disclosure’, which was strongly discouraged in training as it may erode the psychoanalytical process. However, my physical appearance holds an unavoidable disclosure which was actively being ignored. In these following vignettes I will discuss some clinical examples to explore how race, or more specifically, the lack of consideration of racial awareness has had an impact on the therapy.
Vignette 1
When working with refugee children from Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia in 2012, I worked with male clients aged between 12 and 17 years old who were referred to music therapy having arrived from war-affected countries, separated from all or part of their families. For the young person, being thrust into a school and then almost immediately being referred to therapy was arguably unhelpful. However, the schools struggled to accommodate these new, traumatised young people who spoke little to no English and extra funding had been made available to help them to find a way to better ‘integrate’ into school and British life. The government was on the cusp of introducing the Prevent strategy, a government anti-terrorism scheme designed to identify individuals at risk of radicalisation (HM Government, 2011). I went into this work considering the client’s trauma of political oppression, without an understanding of what that actually meant and with the idealistic view that music could help anything and everything. However, as the Music Therapist engaging with those clients in the therapy space I had provided (on my terms), I had not considered their cultural view of me. Of course, I had understood that each client had been forced into a new and alien environment. I also understood that there was a language barrier, and that I had no real understanding of the trauma of their recent experiences. What I failed to consider were the implications my gender or race would have on clients. It simply did not register in my clinical decision process to consider these, as all my life I had been fed the fallacy that these barriers did not exist. Furthermore, these kinds of issues had never arisen or been considered while training or in supervision.
This lack of consideration of cultural difference extended to the musical instruments I used. A 14-year-old boy was referred to me having been relocated to the United Kingdom from Eritrea. His family was seeking refugee status as they were fleeing an oppressive government regime and along the way, this boy had been split from his family, with only a few members living with him in a difficult housing situation. For his therapy sessions, I provided a range of percussive items: shakers, a small xylophone, bells and so on, as well as djembe drums, a large ocean drum and a guitar. As a Music Therapist who went into many different schools in the week, I utilised a kit bag that I used for all my sessions. Practicality won out over purposeful thought when it came to instrument choice, leaving him with Western instruments and sounds that I recognised well but which perhaps left him further alienated and without a voice.
Given my lack of understanding of his cultural needs, his present, unprocessed trauma and my sensed perception of his bias towards me as a Brown female, it was inevitable that the therapeutic alliance became too difficult to foster and the therapy ‘failed’ as we could not meet each other in the space I had created for us. I compartmentalised this by placing the blame firmly on his inability to meet me in the space. My reflexive thinking, including that done in supervision, centred around issues of the practicalities of being in a school environment, the client’s unexplored traumatic circumstances and my inability to engage them appropriately in the music when those chances emerged. I had not considered the Western-centric paradigm of therapeutic intervention that inevitably impacted the client. Asking him to be alone in a room with a young female Brown person may have been an insurmountable barrier for him. Perhaps asking him to be in a room with a young, female white person or an older male person would have presented him with a different set of challenges too; perhaps easier but maybe not? What I did experience, however, was his reluctance to engage with me, which I interpreted as a racial slur; a familiar feeling gained from his facial expressions and the dismissiveness I encountered both in my transference and countertransference in the space we shared.
Before entering the therapy space, I had thought about my approach to the session. I tended to follow a psychodynamic stance which allowed the process to unfold with as little direction as possible. At times I used structure to enable a musical dialogue. However, with this client, I was aware of the difficulties the language barrier would create. I placed my trust in the process of making music together, the non-verbal communication and musical interpretation but it soon became evident that the other barriers meant we were unable to connect. In my transference I felt uncomfortable and desperate to make some sort of connection which he would be able to grab onto. In my countertransference, I had a sense that my presence in the room as a Brown female was having an impact which was not or could not be verbalised. There was also the reality that our worlds had little common ground; my privileged safe existence in a society where I did not encounter outright oppression through violence set against his need to flee their homeland to remain safe. I had done little to no work to understand his musical and cultural background and my privilege was highlighted in my assumption and expectation for him to follow me: my space, my instruments, my comfort zone. Being client-led is much easier when the cultural landscape is shared. One that is drastically different to our own should be considered and held carefully. During my training, the emphasis was to avoid the use of technology and to focus on the improvisational model. As I had only been qualified a short time at this point, I was reluctant to leave the practice model instilled at training and use technology in sessions. Given the opportunity to undertake this work again, I would certainly incorporate technology to try and equalise the musical language, using apps such as Spotify or YouTube. This would not only address some of the communication issues but also allow for a levelling of the power dynamic where the client has control of the tools and material. Having a more robust understanding of the racial and power dynamics including the significance of the instruments would have set a different tone to this work from the start and perhaps would have allowed a more authentic therapeutic alliance to emerge.
Vignette 2
A group of adults with mild learning disabilities were referred to me from a day centre support service working with a South Asian (Indian) diasporic group. The local authority brought in a music therapy service to help the clients with their social skills, self-confidence, self-esteem and emotional expression. There were around 10 participants for the weekly sessions and the therapy ran for a block of six sessions.
The participants had a range of levels of ability and understanding, making it difficult to know how to run the sessions. I used a ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ song to bookend the session and left the rest of it structure-free, asking individuals to share their ideas and bring their music. I used technology to help this along, partly because the music that they brought was in a different language. I used the drum as a grounding instrument to try and bring the music together, and some of the participants started to use that base rhythm to sing too. They sang songs that they knew, and I was surprised to find that I had some recognition of the songs they sang. Although my parents are from Mauritius, an island previously colonised by the Dutch, French and British, they had a strong Indian culture from its indentured labour history and identified as Hindus. As my parents grew up with Indian cultural references and its music, they continued to listen to this in the United Kingdom and I therefore was exposed to it as I grew up. In this work, I was able to recognise the music they were trying to sing and support them in this. It became more than just a recognition of the actual melodies or words; the communal feel they created in their music making was instantly familiar to me from a cultural context also. As part of family gatherings in Mauritius, it is a regular occurrence to gather in groups, especially after a meal and sing songs together. The music was usually old Indian film songs or Sega music, the traditional folk music of Mauritius. It would be sung a cappella or with the accompaniment of a ratan (a traditional drum) or simply tapping rhythmically on the table with the repast’s cutlery and glass making the percussive sound. Often dance would be involved too. I have been part of these communal musical experiences and accepted them as being part of another culture, one steeped in the pursuit of ‘bien amise’ or ‘having a good time’ in which music played a central role but was inextricably linked with food and drink and family. Those experiences meant that the therapeutic work I did with this diasporic group felt connected to something common, cultural and unspoken. It felt familiar and in turn, I was able to feel that my cultural insight provided a responsiveness to the situation through the countertransference. Much of the connectedness and joy of the shared experience was unacknowledged verbally but simply allowed people to make music in the moment, bringing people together through song.
In this case example, I reluctantly drew on my cultural background and life experiences to engage with a community I thought I had very little in common with. My access to diverse forms of music growing up meant that I had some background knowledge of the material being presented as well as an understanding of how music could be experienced in this way as opposed to the more formalised approach offered through a structured ‘group therapy’ setting. On reflection of this work, I wondered if I could have made more of an impact in this work had I been more culturally aware and accepting of my own musical diversity from the outset. I had spent much of my life as a Brown person experiencing microaggressions and racism from both white and Brown communities. It left me with a sense of not wanting to be Brown and a longing to be white, to fit in with the ‘norm’. The clothes I wore, the music I listened to were all purposefully Western and consciously rejecting of Indian, to induce in others (and myself) a perceived Western identity. In this particular work, my exposure to different music from an early age was a boon, perhaps a privilege, no matter how I perceived it. It made me look at, and begin to appreciate, the cultural richness I was born into and conversely made me wonder about what thinking or experiences a white music therapist would draw upon given the aforementioned lack of discourse in training. Is this an example of cultural (in)competence? Is this something that can be ‘taught’ or does it need to be experienced or lived? Perhaps my approach may have been richer if I was not so ‘reluctant’ to draw on my musical diversity which I could have explored during training.
Concluding thoughts and considerations for the future of music therapy
BAMT has identified the music therapy profession as severely lacking in diversity and focussing on the entry points to the profession is key to addressing some of these issues. No solution will work in isolation; a multifaceted approach utilising a diverse range of voices to shape the future is essential. Failure to act not only denies the client their story, their journey and their lived experience of the world but also those of Music Therapists of colour. It denies the ability to address when biases, racial or cultural, become evident in the work. It disallows our ability to utilise these difficult, challenging moments as an opportunity for growth rather than a taboo issue that gets hidden under oppressive systems that simply deny its existence in the first place. This denial pushes away everything, including the positive aspects of being different and the plethora of different facets of clients and therapists lived experience that can enrich the therapeutic process. I have discovered that pushing my lived experience, diversity and difference to the margins has denied me my right to acknowledge all I bring to the table, for fear of being rebuked, discounted and oppressed. Without understanding ourselves as racialised individuals, it becomes impossible to encounter and interact with the racial difference we receive in the therapeutic space. Due to the inherent power dynamic, therapists have a responsibility to ensure their therapy spaces are considered as open spaces for all facets of their client.
Eugene Ellis writes, ‘within any given audience, some people connect with the experiences I am trying to communicate, and some struggle or feel no connection at all’ (Ellis, 2021: 45). For me personally, the upsurge of the #BlackLivesMatter movement since George Floyd’s murder has been the life buoy stopping me from drowning in the uncertainty that Brexit created. It revealed that our systems and institutions were built on colonial frameworks designed to serve white privilege. Most people who benefit from the system assume equality already exists, never questioning their place in society. As a person of colour, I am conscious that I too have supported these systems in order to benefit and prosper but also now understand that this has been at a cost. I have come to see more clearly the discrimination being purported in the name of equality in every system I encounter. It is my postulation that those who are rarely affected by issues of oppression, are those who may struggle to connect with the ideas and discussion in this article. There is work for us all to do, even for the most enlightened of us. The naivety that allows us to believe the work is ‘done’, completed or that we cannot possibly be perpetrators of oppression are those who are at the highest risk of doing just that.
In a recent article, Silveira (2020) wrote, As a minority profession within the medical model, assumptions are often made about what music therapy entails . . . In striving toward greater music therapy understanding and access in this setting, we make an effort to attend more team meetings and push for collaboration. In doing so, we are able to challenge and potentially change the incorrect assumptions made about the profession of music therapy . . . if we are already equipped with the capacity and thus mindset to challenge untrue assumptions about the profession of music therapy, then why not channel this skill by taking a stand against the biases experienced by our fellow Music Therapists who experience adversity? This can be your small step toward social change. (p. 8)
This sentiment rings so true for me personally and the fight to advocate for the client is continuous and arduous. We as Music Therapists have a unique skill set, allowing us to communicate effectively and advocate for those who have no voice. It is time to think about our place in the world and conduct ourselves in a way in which we are open, transparent and accountable. Our seeming lack of action in this arena is no longer acceptable; it is 2023 and promise for change was forthcoming in BAMT’s (2020) report. Those of us who feel directly impacted by the issues raised in this article, by oppression, need to see music therapy take its experiences seriously and begin to action change. It is now up to the profession to listen and take affirmative action.
This is not research
This is about lived experience and the pain of Music Therapists of colour. It seems sensible to start looking at the courses where new Music Therapists are created. A true decolonisation of the training programmes is essential and yet difficult to achieve. I am reticent in suggesting that simply changing the content of the training courses will solve the pervasive issues discussed here. The infrastructure of training itself needs overhauling for our diverse trainees to have the appropriate spaces to explore their identities. A colleague recently said, ‘what is the point of letting us in, if there is no space for us to be?’ A creation of safe, open spaces takes time, thought and work. This work is difficult without leadership from those with lived experience or who have done the work. Mistakes will be unavoidable, and people of colour will continue to be hurt. Perhaps these are the challenges the music therapy profession faces when thinking about race and culture in praxis. I am personally willing to put the work in while I still believe there is scope for change, but this is a journey that cannot be done in isolation. It is only working in collaboration with a willingness to see and dismantle oppressive systems that we may shift the discourse to one that is truly about Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging.
