Georgia Anne Muldrow: Jazz IS about race

Fewer than 10 percent of the students who graduate with jazz degrees from American universities are Black, although they make 12,7% of general population, and in 2017 only 1 percent were Black women (over 6% in general population), New York Times reports about the issue of race in music, jazz in particular. It says that "over the past 50 years, the music has become entrenched in academic institutions. As a result, it’s often inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black Americans". Georgia Anne Muldrow, a student in the jazz program at New York's New School, goes deeper with her insight about the very character of jazz taught in schools: "At the center of the teaching would always be the idea that jazz is not about race. And it absolutely is. It was absolutely about where people weren’t allowed to go, which made them travel in their music".