Month: September 2015

“Not a member of the African diaspora” is a non-racist way to  rename whiteness.

It’s too wordy to be a good handle, but it is a reasonable meaning.

A test I’d apply to any alternative word for white is whether it captures me, a white of African descent. My grandmother was born in Africa*. Her parents or grandparents were from France. My father, her son, was born in Africa. His father was from Belgium. I was born in the US. So I am African-American but the one-drop rule would name me white.

There is also the smell test for alternative words. Is it violent or supremacist, like “master race” or “Aryan”?

“Non-diaspora” would pass both these tests.

 

 

 

Black ethnicity has had many names. But not white. It’s time for whiteness to have a new name.

 

I have posted up a 26-track EP over on FreeMusicArchive. That’s three songs + 23 cuts, bumpers, stems, pellas and backing tracks:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Joy_Drops/Not_Drunk_EP/

First of all, these are just three songs to have fun with.

But the other 23 tracks are for remixers. New music shouldn’t be frozen and hard. It should flow into culture.

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Maybe video makers, podcasters and remixers only need a single track. In that case the variety of lengths and types makes it more likely that one will fit.

Also I hope that having a collection of related snippets will enable podcasters and video makers to use them together as an integrated theme, similar to a Twitter Bootstrap theme for web pages. My hope is that people will be able to tie together the elements of a podcast or a video using these sets of different but similar pieces of music.

Posting a collection of samples is an outgrowth of projects I have done at Freesound and CC Mixter, where I’ve been posting sample packs with a bunch of closely related snippets, from a few seconds to 60 seconds.

Freesound and Mixter aren’t for fully mixed songs, though. Free Music Archive is the right place.

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These recordings are under a Creative Commons license. There are a bunch of CC licenses. I used the Attribution license, which says you can do anything you want (even commercially) as long as you give credit.  It’s almost as permissive as you can get. I have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Also, it’s an official Free Cultural Work, which I think is just the right thing to do.