“History does not belong to you” is something he kept saying at the beginning of class. I remember liking history in High school because I had a good teacher, but I hate museums because I constantly get scolded for trying to touch things. In my mind, if there is not glass to block me, I always assume that it is OK to touch. I obviously am not well liked by museum guards.

Talking about authority reminded me that history is always told from a perspective. Even in textbooks it is. I don’t necessarily think that is problematic to, for example, raise the lunch counter to encourage people to think about civil rights instead of lunch. That’s the point of the museum. The whole place is supposed to encourage people to think about history. Those people went to the museum to think about it. I don’t think it’s wrong for them to think about lunch and reminisce, that’s still American History, but they chose to go to a curated collection of artifacts.

I do, however, think that it is wrong to misrepresent things the way they did with the example of an internment camp room. This is what I didn’t like about history; it is always biased based on who is telling it and people can never separate emotions from it. It really frustrates me that the exhibit was set up like that and I don’t think that it is useful to anyone for the room to be presented like that. That is not history, and even if it makes people feel better about what happened, it is essentially a lie, which COMPLETELY DEFEATS THE PURPOSE of even going to a museum in the first place, those people may as well have read a children’s book talking about internment if they didn’t want to see the truth.

I think it’s really funny when the people on Fox News say that people should keep their politics out of music, because music has never been not political. It has always been about displacement and taboo topics and breaking boundaries.

I couldn’t stand any of the songs that were played today. They sounded like donkeys. I hate yodeling. I had always thought that these songs were trying way too hard to be country, and I guess I was right. They were presenting stylized versions of what they thought was folk and country. It just so happens that it all sounded terrible.

The idea of folk music being something that is disconnected from commerce is such an oxymoron. They would go to people who were disenfranchised and hadn’t been discovered and loved them for those reasons. Then, they’d make them rich and famous which completely ruins their original appeal. It’s like when annoying hipsters love small bands and want them to be successful, but when they finally gain success they complain that the band ‘sold out’ or became too mainstream. This is something that happens so often.

I also think it’s kind of rich that country music has so many elements that come from African music and Hawaiian music. I’m from Kentucky, so bluegrass and country is something that I was very familiar with before I actually started to listen to stuff that didn’t make me want to shoot myself and I had never known that those sounds were adopted by people who were most likely racist toward the people they were trying to sound like.

I HATED the song about the ‘dark skinned Filipino’ that the stupid cowboy sang. I absolutely hated it. I am Korean and I’m from Boone County Kentucky. Me and my family were the on ly not white people I knew for a while, and we were definitely the most ‘exotic’ things many of those people had seen. They made a big deal about it. I don’t look very Asian, so I don’t really have to deal with this, but my sister definitely has to deal with a lot of really creepy people basically fetishizing her because she is Asian. It is something that a lot of Asian women are subjected to; Asian women are usually characterized as subservient and exotic women that are easy to get. This song was so annoying. I found it to be racist and insensitive and it wasn’t even catchy. It basically portrayed the woman as an object. He may have loved her, but he didn’t describe her as a person.

It really disgusts me to think about our country’s history. Not only because it was full of such racism, but also because it really wasn’t that long ago. I hadn’t known about some of the things that happened in America like spectacle lynchings, but it honestly didn’t surprise me. The thing that really shocked me was that they were a family event. Respectable people would dress up to watch a black person get murdered. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that refined people would enjoy, but who am I to talk? I wasn’t there.

When the professor talked about race records I could see that they were kind of an illogical invention. He was trying to convince us that music was integrated even though society was not, and it wasn’t hard to see. Blacks, whites, Americans, and immigrants worked together to make music that would sell. Behind the scenes, it didn’t matter where a sound came from or what color the person who played it was, it just needed to sound good. And as long as people didn’t know that it came from an integrated band, they’d be happy to listen to it.

Racism is something that defies all logic and I think that music is something that might have helped some people realize that in some small way.