Two white music professors call for ‘war machine’ to promote racial equality

Professors Erika Knapp (University of North Texas, pictured) and Whitney Mayo (University of North Dakota, inset) have published a paper that claims embedded racism in university music departments and demands radical action through a so-called ‘war machine’.

The paper is titled Disrupting Racism in Music Education: Conceptualizing Admissions Processes Through the State and the War Machine.

Sample text:

‘The war machine lives outside the boundaries of the State and is best understood in terms of its emancipatory potential as an apparatus that cannot and will not be captured by the State. According to Deuchars (2019), war machines are ways of thinking that are so radical to the State that they wage war on existing orders of knowledge with guerrilla logic. The war machine works externally on the margins, disrupting the State’s regime while resisting capture.

‘The relationship between the State and the war machine is ongoing and dynamic, with the war machine always being at risk of being reappropriated by the State if it gets too close or if it endangers the safety and control the State desires.

‘Because of the State’s ability to appropriate and conform bodies into the continuation of its own goals, the war machine must always be on guard, remaining in the process of becoming and evolving as an ever-shifting, fluid entity. Even when the State tries to appropriate, the war machine will shift and disrupt from the margins in a new way, because it knows how the State works and can devise new actions of resistance.

‘While some music education scholars view the war machine in relational opposition to the State (Hess 2014; Jorgenson and Yob 2013), others describe the warmachine as a limitless space, neither outside nor in binary opposition to the State, but altogether different (Gould 2009). The main goal of the war machine is as a “counteractive force to decode the flows of capitalism” (Deuchars 2019, n.p.). In this way, it is not necessarily a better way of thinking or being, but a different way. …’

Discuss.