Music and the Fear Factor.

I had a rare yen to listen to some old Motown tracks tonight, and it struck me that it must have taken some courage on the part of producers and record companies to make stars of black people like The Supremes and The Four Tops. This was in America which had its own version of apartheid, and where less than a decade before, upright men in the Deep South were dismantling TV relay masts so their womenfolk wouldn’t see Nat King Cole singing romantic songs. It was OK to hear him, as long as they couldn’t see that he was black.

Oddly, I don’t blame them for that. Both rightness and reality are more subjective concepts than most people acknowledge, and fear does damnable things to a person’s perception of them.