This summer I spent a month working as the Office Coordinator at a music camp where I was a student for many years. When I first got to work, I was excited to learn that we were presenting a class called Social Justice in Jazz, in which students discussed stereotypes in the context of jazz music (women don’t like long solos; white people over-intellectualize music) and gained tools to help them talk about sensitive topics like race, gender and sexual identity. “Speak your truth” and “expect and accept discomfort” were some of these tools.
The latter struck a chord with me. Expect and accept discomfort. Nowadays, discomfort is one of the things we avoid at all costs. We surround ourselves with people who reinforce our opinions and look, speak and hold the same number of degrees as we do. It’s considered rude to bring up politics and religion at social gatherings and risk inciting a debate. Why? Because validating differing philosophies and perspectives makes us reevaluate our own, and that is uncomfortable. Because the anxiety of insecurity is a small tug boat in a sea of uncertainty pushing us towards ideological isolation. And it is in this place where we can rest easy, knowing that we are morally and intellectually superior to the faceless others who do not think like we do.
Evading discomfort does wonders for one’s ego, but it doesn’t teach us anything. The beauty and the gift of discomfort is that it breaks open our notions of truth and forces us to confront a new reality, one that incorporates the stories, sacrifices and truths of those whose lives are vastly different from ours.
This was the goal of the Social Justice in Jazz class. To open the floor to every student who wanted to speak his, her or their truth, and leave them with a better understanding of what music can be when we see each other as whole, complex and legitimate beings.
Some people did not share this belief. Before the Social Justice class even ended, I received a phone call from a mother who asserted that we were “indoctrinating” her son with a “liberal agenda,” that this class has nothing to do with music and her son doesn’t hate anybody, why do we think he hates people?
I was bewildered. How badly I wanted to shout “Good!” when she told me her son felt excluded, probably for the first time in his life. How desperately I wanted to explain that jazz came about in response to and in protest of intolerance and racism that permeates our country to this day. I wanted to tell her that I am the only woman in my major, and even though I embrace that now, I would have given anything to have someone tell my younger self that my experiences in this male-dominated field were valid, and teach me to be comfortable sharing them.
But my job was not to say those things. My job was to listen, and the conversation never left the realm of polite civility. She thanked me for my time, I hung up the phone, locked the office door and plunged my head in my hands until a 12-year old girl came knocking a minute later, in need of a tissue. As I left the office that day, still rattled from that conversation, I passed a group of campers discussing the Social Justice class.
“It was…interesting,” one of them said slowly, “but good.”
It wasn’t a resounding endorsement, but in the silence between the words one could hear the sound of newly-formed gears beginning to turn, and that is what mattered the most.