“Inappropriate, Unprofessional, Illegal” Music Education: Divisive Concepts Laws as Know-Your-Place Aggression

• In Event: Critical Perspectives in Music Education

Abstract

A recent survey by the National Association for Music Education (Salvador, 2023) indicated that two-thirds of the music educators participating in the survey reported “negative impacts on their teaching, their students, or themselves.” The absurdity of the attacks is surely matched only by the irony, given the overwhelmingly White teacher corps in music education, not to mention the conservative nature of most of the repertoire and pedagogy. The absurdity is in part the point, and in any case should not hide the true nature of these attacks as “know-you-place aggression” intended to reinforce Whiteness in education. In this paper we examine the nature of the attacks on music educators as examples of know-your-place aggression.

Authors

• Richard C. Miller, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Katrina Liu, University of Nevada - Las Vegas