As the Trump administration continues its war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the latest casualty of its efforts is the Emerging Black Composers Project, an initiative that was created in 2020 to help Black composers overcome barriers to their participation in the field; that initiative is now paused indefinitely.
According to The San Francisco Chronicle, the winners of the program, which is awarded through a collaboration between the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony, receive a $15,000 commissioning fee, a premiere with the Conservatory, the San Francisco Symphony, or the Oakland Symphony as well mentorship from those organizations’ music directors.
Jens Ibsen, the 2022 Emerging Black Composers Project winner, told the Chronicle that he feels the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights wants to censor art, using the threat of pulling funding for diverse creators in order to accomplish this goal. “The government is using the pulling of funding as a cudgel to basically censor art by people they just don’t care to hear from,” Ibsen said.
Although the Department of Education’s Feb. 14 memo describes
efforts to increase diversity as “shameful” and “repugnant,” the Conservatory and the San Francisco Symphony are thinking of ways to continue the program, including having the Symphony, which is not subject to the Department of Education’s purview, take over the program.The two organizations issued a joint statement to the Chronicle, indicating that although they have not worked out the details, they believe strongly in the program’s future.
“The San Francisco Symphony is not impacted by this recent Executive Order and remains fully committed to ensuring that the Emerging Black Composers
Project will continue. We are still working out the details for how the project moves forward, but this project remains important to both the Symphony and SFCM,” the organizations said in a statement.Like various lawsuits by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, the memo from Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor argues that programs like the Emerging Black Composers Project, which seeks to correct the marginalization of Black composers, is discriminatory against white people, a perversion of Civil Rights anti-discrimination legislation passed thanks to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
The letter states, “Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism,” and according to Trainor, DEI programs “stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes.”
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