Race, Ethnicity, and Polka
Oktoberfest Clickbait Title FOR THE WIN
NOTE: the following contains political opinions that could be wrong and I’d love to hear why. Just explain why. DON’T YELL AT ME. I’M VERY FRAGILE.
When I was 16, I was called into the principal’s office because I’d drawn a Celtic Cross on my jeans. I was informed that I’d have to go home and change, because the school had positively identified this symbol as a White Power symbol. In fact, they’d hired a consultant and public speaker a few months back who’d provided them with a list of such symbols, and their policy was a total ban. When I got home and told my very feisty Dublin-born mother what had happened… well. Let’s just say that she arranged a meeting and made sure that the Principal wasn’t ever going to do that again.
Now, in most people’s eyes, certain musical genres are powerfully bound up with ideas of cultural history and ethnic heritage. But as this Oktoberfest season gets underway, it’s worth stepping back and asking yourself how, for example, Polka or Irish music got called “ethnic” while the music of, say, Irving Berlin was just “pop music”. His songs (“White Christmas”, "Puttin' on the Ritz" and "Cheek to Cheek") were targeted at a certain kind of person with a certain background and had a certain cultural and religious resonance. But it came to be known as just "pop” or “jazz” with no ethnic label attached. Why? The division of music into ethnic and non-ethnic is actually kind of weird, because all music is from somewhere and for someone. It’s kind of messed up to call Taylor Swift “Pop” but call Daler Mendhi “Indian Pop”, as Wikipedia does.
But given that certain genres are seen as “ethnic", and given that some of those ethnicities are associated with Europe and (to some) with ideas of European “Pride”, we have to ask what to make of them. Cynical readers should not dismiss this topic. A world-famous polka musician of my acquaintance has confided in me that seeing the occasional “Nazi or white supremacist” at his shows has been a deeply unsettling experience. I’ve seen it myself. This is a real thing. What do we do with it?
Well, here’s the problem. The all-too-easy reaction is to say that because there is something particularly “white” about Polka music or whatever, then the genres themselves should be treated with suspicion. I myself encountered this suspicion from lots of people when I started “Polka Time” over in Vancouver. These well-intentioned folks would nervously say things like “this is the whitest thing I’ve ever seen” and would openly wonder whether it was OK to even be playing the music in the age of Trump, given that it was… problematic in this way. This nervousness surely prevents a huge number of white musicians from ever even considering these forms of music.
But this is where things get really tricky, especially in 2022. Many white Canadians and Americans do in fact have historical and familial ties to countries where so-called “ethnic” music is played. And they do experience a sense of rootedness and belonging when they engage with those styles of music, a sense of connection to the past that many people value very deeply. Sometimes, this engagement goes collective and you get things like Cleveland Dyngus Day, an explicit celebration of Polish-American culture featuring polka, pilsner, pierogi, and an amazing guy named DJ Kishka. People wear shirts that say “Polish Pride” and fly the Polish eagle flag around. This stuff, I absolutely guarantee you, would make my hard-left Vancouver friends super nervous if it was happening there.
But here’s the thing: while you might legitimately worry that a small selection of these revelers are less than ideally tolerant, there is no question that the vast majority are wonderful and accepting people. That is what anyone who is embedded in these communities will tell you. And here’s what happens when you tell ordinary, decent, tolerant people that they shouldn’t celebrate their own historical or community connections: they start to feel trapped, like they’re not supposed to exist. The only way out of that trap is anger, defiance, and radicalization. Sound familiar?
To illustrate the trap: when we were running Polka Time we of course realized that all of our material was from a certain subset of European traditions, you know, mainly the ones as white as the Cliffs of Dover. So we thought: why not try to fix this? Well, globally speaking, Polka is actually most popular in Northern Mexico, where millions of people on both sides of the border enjoy it every year. So why not add a couple of Norteña songs to our set?
Can you see what the answer to that question had to be, especially in the Pacific Northwest, in 2018? A big, fat, resounding NO. Even if most people would find it fun, and even if almost anyone from Mexico would probably be fine with it, a significant and vocal minority would be very uncomfortable with this, especially if I sang in Spanish. But singing in Russian was of course fine.
See the trap? You’re white. Obviously you can’t change that. But you should be nervous about playing so-called “white” traditional music, that is problematic because some will take it in the wrong direction. And don’t play nonwhite traditional music, that is appropriation. So what are you supposed to play? The white musician has nowhere to go but back into the arms of rootless, soulless modern genres that completely fail to build and support community. So the overall message is: don’t express your connections to your history or heritage, don’t build communities around these shared experiences. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with contemporary North American politics knows what this trap will do: it will radicalize people, driving them towards preposterous and extreme ideas.
So this is the challenge. First, we must acknowledge that there are real elements (rare but real) in certain genres that must be explicitly resisted.
But we must also resist those who would worry about white “ethnic” music as such, just because it contains these elements, or because it is overwhelmingly white. Yes, just as almost everyone who wears a Celtic Cross is going to be white, you’re never going to look out over Dyngus Day and see a hugely diverse crowd. But remember: you won’t see that at a Lady Gaga or an Ed Sheeran concert either. The world contains people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and part of having a certain background is that you are attracted to certain cultural products and forms. People will cluster around their preferred traditions and genres, there is no other way it can be in a diverse world.
For myself, I hope we can all call out racist bullshit when we actually see it, but not call anyone out because our weird ideas of what counts as “white” are making us irrationally nervous. Polka on, friends, and a happy Oktoberfest season to you all.
I liked this article, thanks. I think one issue is that white isn't a culture. Polish is. Russian is. Mexican is. These even have subcultures. White is not and does not. I think we run into trouble when we mistake white for culture, which is why some might struggle with a Polish pride festival. They're celebrating Polish-ness, not white-ness. I think the Dreadnoughts and Polka Time celebrate polka (the latter more, obviously), which is part of *some* European cultures (like mine; my mom is German). I don't know about, say, Finnish (or other Baltic) or Armenian polka, but who knows? Maybe there's a vibrant Baltic or Black Sea polka community I don't know about.
In years past, I would frequently end up rubbing shoulders with Far-Right / White Supremacist individuals in a political setting who thought I was in agreement with them. You touch on a couple of things that sound incredibly familiar.
Firstly these ideologies absolutely weaponize the loss of culture we've experienced over the last few decades, using an idealised, and stylised caricature of culture to create a sense of community. In my non-academic view, a lot of these extremists are driven fundamentally much more by a sense of loss than hatred. The cure to this isn't to repress the cultures they are making caricatures of, but to openly celebrate, appreciate, and invite those who were previously shunned from, this culture. I think the Dreadnoughts are a great example of how to do this.
In the UK we see examples of this too, although perhaps less binary than the concept of whiteness feeling problematic. I'm sure the entire folk-punk scene cringed when Nigel Farage came to Thatchers Cider's defence.
There is I think something to be said about how cultural appropriation of certain white cultures unintentionally reinforces the power of the Far-Right's cultural caricatures. I won't name names, but there's a proliferation of 'Irish Punk' bands from the Continent whose music is like a laundry-list of insulting stereotypes: Get Drunk, Fight the English, yadeyadeya. I can't speak for all the cultures The Dreadnoughts have been inspired by, but your incorporation of Westcountry influences has always felt appreciative rather than exploitative. I dread the day we start seeing a German band called 'Dick Taylor and the Scrumpy-Jugs'.