Today in class professor talked about when he was a grad-students at a museum and was working when a new exhibit was opening about Japanese camps during WW2 I believe he said. When all these Japanese people came into the museum to see this new exhibit and they were furious when the saw the representation of the barracks that the museum claimed the Japanese lived in. The museum had created a very picturesque version of the barracks when in reality they barracks did not have a nice view of the mountains but of barbed wire and machine gun towers. This story made me think of something that my mom said this week. My parents went to the new movie I can Only Imagine which is about the life of the lead vocalist for MercyMe Bart Millard. My dad makes that comment that the movie isn’t actually in the chronological order of Millard’s life. My mom’s response was that none of our lives are movie worthy the way they actually happened. To be movie worthy out lives would need to be rearranged and exaggerated.

This is so true in today’s world. Just like the barracks which were re-envisioned for the public so are the “true story” movies that come out in theaters. This probably happens to a lot of the relics in museums so what is real? Is our vision of what history is the actual facts or just a juiced up story to get more donation or money?

My background tends to be different from most. I was adopted at six weeks old into a white family. I was the second child to be adopted into this family and both my older adoptive sister and I were biracial, half black and half white. This racial mixture led to a lot of uncomfortable situation growing up being because we looked black and our parents were both white. I struggled with an identity crisis in middle school trying to figure out if I was white or if I was black because I never really fit in with either crowd. I remember volunteering at an inner-city summer camp and all the kids were around 6 years old and they were all black. One day for lunch they were having collard greens, which is something that I had never had before. So, when I tried them and did not like them the first question that these 6 years-olds asked me was,” Were you raised by white people?” This seemed like a strange question to ask, but I learned that collards greens are an African American culture thing. Since I did not like them or know what they were even these little kids could tell I was not raised in a black culture.

So if I’m biracial which culture do I belong to? That was the question that I tried to answer for so many years. One of the largest issues that I was found was in the types of music I listened to. My parents are Christians and always listened to a lot of Christian music in the car when I was growing up. They also liked the listen to country music so of course, those were the genres of music that I started listening to. However, when people started telling me that it was weird that I listened to county music because black people listen to rap music I switched to listening to rap. But it wasn’t for me in the long run. This segregation in the genres of music is the main point in Segregation of Sounds by Miller. He brings up the point that different genres of music were categorized based on peoples race. For example, hip-hop and rap or black music and country and pop are white music.

These stereotypes of music and culture did not help me to find out who I was really was. So as I grew older I learned that I don’t fit into a mold or a stereotype. I have raised my white parents, I talk white (which is apparently is just being able to use propertEnglishsh), my clothing choices are a mix of both white and black,  and my music playlist is a mix of everything. I no longer let stereotypes that society has conjured up over time define who I am because I am not white and I am not black, I am both. I guess that kind of makes me a rebel but I think it just makes me, me

Ever since I learned about time displacement of time I think it is such interesting topic becuause there are thousands of examples of displacment throught history. The funny thing is that no one really thinks about. For example, during the black and white migrations during the early 1900s records were a type of time displacement. I mean think about any kind of recording of music it allows anyone from any time the means to be able to listen to the songs/songs at their own free will. Gone are the days of having to go to the opera house and listen to a live performance. In today’s busy world we would find that very inconvenient.

However, during this time when records were being made so was the line between white and black musicians. Record labels were segregated and the genre of music was too. White artists were known for singing hillbilly music. They would dress up in overalls and sings about some random things that did not make all that much sense. There were also different norms between white artist and black artists. For example, Cowboy Copas in his song Filipino Baby basically talked about the love of his life but only in terms of individual body parts, which sounds creepy. But there were many sounds about by white male artists singing about their minority colored lovers but if it was unheard of for a black male artist to sing about his white lover. It most likely would not have ended very well if a black musician had because of all the racial tension during this time period.

I feel like most people have heard about the migration of people from the rural South up North to the big urban cities. However, I don’t think I really ever put two and two together that around that same time is when Jim Crow laws were created to try to prevent African American’s from doing a lot the same things that white people were doing. The white people were trying to disenfranchising the black population very openly.

With this migration of African Americans out of the south, there was new kind of culture because of the change in geography. This also lead to a change in music…….sort of. With many blacks looking to make it big in the big city whites took advantage and tried to make some money off of the innocent. Blacks where signed to record companies and some were told what lyrics to sing. But the ironic this is that most of the lyrics were about moving back down south….which made no sense, but it was sung to a southern folk tune that the new African Americans that had just moved from the South could connect to. Then as the market started to change these new artists would completely change their genre of music to something like jazz because the authenticity of a singer was dependent on the market and what people wanted to hear.

I just found it so interesting how an artist who was a folk singer in the South could just switch to singing jazz. But the more they continued to change from genre to genre the more credible they were because they never got left behind with the changing taste in music. Also, it’s surprising how famous some of the artists became after all the restriction in where their records could be sold because society tried as hard as they could to keep black culture in the black population and only the black culture. All because of Jim Crow laws, but the irony in Jim Crow is he is a minstrel character who is a white man posing as a black man.