I was on a work call recently when a song from the late eighties came through the speakers.
A song I used to absolutely love. One of those songs that hits you in the chest before your brain even registers what it is – muscle memory, bone memory, something deeper than either. I dropped a comment in the team chat. Within seconds the chat was alive. Everyone pumped. Great energy. Great start to a meeting.
And then I sat back and thought about it.
Because here is what I know that the chat did not know. What they heard was a crossover. A song that made it past the velvet rope. A Black song that got approved for general audience consumption because it was polished enough, safe enough, or catchy enough to travel beyond the community that created it.
They liked the passport stamp. They have never been to the country.
Let me tell you what I did.
For one week I quoted Black songs in my team chat. Not obscure deep cuts. Not B-sides. Hits. Frankie Beverly and Maze. The Commodores. Sade.
Not one-hit-wonders. Not forgotten artists. Legendary. Catalog-defining. The kind of songs that have been playing at every Black cookout, every family reunion, every road trip, every late night kitchen moment for decades. The kind of songs that Black people know in their bones the way white people know the Beatles.
The response from my colleagues?
Um. What is that from?
Every single person on my team. Either silent or oblivious. Not one person recognized a single reference. Not Frankie Beverly. Not the Commodores. Not Sade. All of them. Confirming what I already suspected. The divide is not a crack. It is a canyon.
Here is what they do not know.
Black people created every major music genre in America.
Every single one.
Jazz. Blues. Gospel. R&B. Hip-hop. Reggae. Rock and roll. And here is the one that always stops people – the very foundation of country and folk music traces back to African instruments and musical traditions brought by enslaved people. White musicians learned to play the banjo from Black people. The banjo is an African instrument. Country music – the genre most associated with white American identity – has Black roots that the industry spent a century burying.
America’s admiration for Black culture has always coincided with its blatant disdain for Black people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of American music. Take the art. Dismiss the artist. Rename the genre. Claim the innovation. Repeat.
Research confirms what Black people have always known – there is an overall pattern of racial segregation in musical tastes, and Black musical styles sit at the center of racial crossover while white musical styles almost never travel in the other direction. The exchange is one-sided and always has been. Black people absorb white musical culture because we have to. We are surrounded by it. We grew up the only one in classrooms and offices and neighborhoods where country, pop, and rock were the default soundtrack. We learned to appreciate it because the environment required it.
White audiences engage with Black music on their own terms, when it crosses over, when it gets approved, when it presents what one scholar called an acceptable form of Blackness for white tastes. The crossover song gets a ticket in. The catalog stays at the door.
The only one in the room problem.
I have spent most of my professional life as the only one. The only Black person in the classroom. The only one in the division. The only one at the table. This is an experience that shapes you in ways that take years of therapy to fully inventory.
But it gave me something that most of my white colleagues do not have.
Range.
When you are the only one you learn the music of the room you are in. You develop an ear for country songs that are genuinely beautiful. You find the rock albums that actually move something in you. You discover the pop songwriters who are doing something real underneath the surface. You build a catalog that crosses every boundary because the boundaries were never yours to begin with.
The average Black person knows a significant catalog of white music. Not because we sought it out necessarily. Because it sought us. It was on every radio station, every movie soundtrack, every office speaker, every elevator, every waiting room. We absorbed it whether we wanted to or not.
The average white person in my experience cannot name three Sade songs. Cannot tell you the difference between early Frankie Beverly and late Frankie Beverly. Does not know that Before I Let Go exists as anything other than a Beyonce song. Has never sat with a Commodores album from beginning to end and felt what that does to a person.
That is not a small thing. That is a cultural illiteracy that they have never been required to address because the culture around them has never demanded it.
What Black music actually does.
This is the part that I cannot fully explain to someone who has not grown up inside it but I am going to try.
Black music is not entertainment first. It is testimony first.
It was created by people who were not allowed to speak their full truth in any other form. The blues was not sad songs about sad feelings. It was documentation. It was the archive of a people processing unimaginable pain through the only outlet available. Gospel was not church music. It was a coded language of survival and transcendence. R&B was not love songs. It was the full spectrum of human emotional experience compressed into three minutes because three minutes was what they gave us.
When Frankie Beverly sings about joy and pain like sunshine and rain he is not making a metaphor. He is delivering a whole theology. When Sade is in her lower register telling you about a man she should not love anymore she is not performing sadness. She is speaking directly into your nervous system. When the Commodores play Easy like Sunday Morning they are not describing a mood. They are giving you permission to put down whatever you have been carrying.
Black music sponsors emotion. It creates the conditions for catharsis. It holds space for pain and celebration simultaneously in a way that almost no other musical tradition does because it was built by people who had to hold both at the same time just to survive.
You do not learn that from a crossover hit. You learn it by going in. All the way in. By sitting with an album from beginning to end. By following an artist through their career. By letting the music do what it was designed to do.
Most white audiences have never done that. And because they have never been required to – because the culture never asked it of them – they probably will not.
What I am asking Black people to do.
This is the part that might surprise you because it is not about them. It is about us.
I am asking Black people to go deeper into Black music than they currently go.
Not the crossover. Not the radio version. Not the Spotify algorithm version that is designed to keep you in a comfortable lane. The catalog. The deep cuts. The genres you have not spent time in yet.
If you grew up on hip-hop – spend a month with classic soul. If R&B is your home base – find your way into jazz. If you know the contemporary artists – go back to the architects. Muddy Waters. Mahalia Jackson. Nina Simone. Curtis Mayfield. The Isley Brothers. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly. Sade’s complete discography start to finish.
If you have never explored blues – and I mean real blues, not the polished version – find it. Sit with it. Let it do what it was designed to do.
Black music listeners are 27% more likely to listen to Black music because it helps them find and interact with a community of new people who share similar interests. The community is already there. The music is already there. What it needs is for you to go find the parts of it that the radio never brought to you.
There is a genre of Black music somewhere that you have not discovered yet that will bring you to a place the ancestors needed you to uncover. Something that will sit in your chest and rearrange something. Something that will make you understand why we are the way we are, why we feel the way we feel, why we have survived what we have survived.
That is not in the crossover. That is in the catalog.
Go find it.What Black artist or album changed something in you that you were not expecting? And what Black genre have you never fully explored? Drop it in the comments – let’s build a list.
