You might not know the name “Little” Stevie Van Zandt, but yet may be familiar with his “art.”
Van Zandt first gained prominence back in the 1970s as the lead guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s East Street Band. He also hosts a long running radio program called Little Steven’s Underground Garage. And during the turn of the 21st century, he reached a whole new audience as an actor. He played the role of Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano’s consigliere on The Sopranos.
Van Zandt has a long history of working to fight racism. For example, in 1985 he authored and co-produced the protest song “Sun City,” one of the era’s anti-apartheid anthems. In conjunction with that, he supported the entertainment industry’s boycott of Sun City, a performance venue created by the racist South African government.
So, can Stevie Van Zant be racist?
Of course he can, as recently witnessed by a series of tweets in which he claimed that black musicians, while being instrumental in the founding of rock n roll, “did not elevate the rock idiom into an artform”
In order to unpack this, we need to begin with the difference between adjectives and nouns, the difference between being being racist and being A racist.
Nouns are more complicated. Is Stevie Van Zandt a racist? I suspect not, but I honestly don’t know. It can be a difficult question to answer. Because asking if someone is a racist is like asking if they’re a Christian or a Democrat or an intellectual. You’re asking if a central part of their conscious existence is defined by and identified with that ideology.
Adjectives, in this case, are much easier. When you ask if is someone is being racist (as opposed to a racist), you’re not inquiring about their core personality. You’re asking something more concrete. Are they doing something racist even if they don’t realize they’re being racist? Are they doing something racist things even though they adamantly believe that they are not in fact a racist?
In the case of Van Zandt, the answer to both of these questions, at least right now, seem to be Yes.
So how does this come about? How does someone who has actively worked to combat racism in numerous ways (he has done other good work beyond Sun City), end up not only saying racist things, but not even realizing he’s being racist, and earnestly denying it when confronted?
The short answer is, there are many different ways to be racist and to express racist ideas. We’re all well aware of the extreme version: Believing in and openly advocating straightforwardly racist ideas, or intentionally engaging in obviously racists actions. For example, claiming that black people are inherently inferior to whites, or angrily screaming racist epithets. But these are merely the most extreme examples. Ideas of white superiority and non-white inferiority go back centuries in American and European cultures. Because of that, they take many forms, some of which are quit subtle, indirect, and easy to miss.
That’s what going on with Stevie Van Zandt. It’s not that he necessarily has racist ideas about black people. He may not. But he seems to have, without realizing it, longstanding racist ideas about something else: Art.
Van Zandt seems caught up on some rigid yet esoteric idea of what an “artform” is. And therein lies the problem. Van Zandt apparently does not recognize is that “art” is an idea Europeans began inventing, at least in its modern form, during the Rennaisance. In other words, it’s what we might call a social construct (society invented the idea).
That’s not at all to say Europeans invented what we generally think of as art. Obviously, human societies all over the world have been creating what we now think of as “art” at least as far back as cave paintings. Rather, it’s that Europeans came up with a set of ideas about which human creations and activities count as “art” and which don’t.
When socially constructed ideas become ingrained in a culture, people tend to take them for granted. People just accept them as “real.” And of course, that in turn does make them real, in a way. But they’re still ideas, not matter or energy. In other words, you can’t actually touch art. You can only define it, and identify objects (or sounds) as art, and others as not.
By the early 20th century, innovative Western “artists” had begun to challenge these kinds of categories. Why are some creative expressions art and others not? A mid-20th century American composer famous for asking these questions was John Cage. Below you can watch him perform “Water Walk,” a piece that is designed, in part, to challenge listeners about which sounds are music and which aren’t. Also pay attention to comments by the the show’s host, and audience reactions; they are revealing.
But Van Zandt obviously hasn’t really asked himself questions about why we call some things “art” and not other things. Instead, he thoughtlessly clings to this socially constructed abstraction of certain music as achieving the status an “artform,” and other music being something lesser, something not “art.”
Calling some things “art”, and other things “not art,” isn’t at all racist. Or at least, it certainly doesn’t have to be. It may be simplistic and even misguided, but not necessarily racists (or sexist or classist). But it does create the opportunity to stumble into racist presumptions, and that’s what Van Zandt has done.
First he inherits our society’s concept of the the “art form.” Then he defines an entire genre of black composers and musicians as being outside it.
Is this racist? Absolutely. But it’s not the kind of racism that is based on a hatred or even fear of black people. Rather, it’s the kind that systemically defines them as lesser. First you accept the cultural prejudice that art forms are superior in some ways to not artistic expression, and then you claim that certain black musicians did not create art.
Yet Van Zandt doesn’t see this as racist. Why? At least two reasons.
First, he acknowledges that blacks invented rock n roll, and also acknowledges that after white people supposedly turned it into art, some black musicians (Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, etc.) also “did wonderful things” with it, meaning they too made art. So he’s not saying blacks are incapable. And this leads to the second reason why he thinks he’s not being racist.
Van Zandt blames his racist assertion on . . . wait for it . . . racism.
In his mind, he’s not being racist. Rather, he’s doing a good thing by exposing the racism that prevented certain black musicians from creating actual “art.” He presumes that those musicians absolutely could have, and probably would have made art, but they were victimized by racist exclusions and limitations. He acknowledges that Blacks of a certain era invented rock, but believes they didn’t transform it into a art form because society’s racism prevented them from doing so, and only allowed white people to do so at first.
There is an irony here. On the one hand, Van Zandt recognizes and laments the deeply racist history of America, and how African Americans were unfairly victimized by it. At the same time, however, he is himself defining a certain group of black musicians as lesser through his his own fixation on calling some forms of music an “artform” and excluding others from that lofty category.
Is Stevie Van Zandt a racist? I have no idea, and there’s a good chance that he is not. But is he being racist? Absolutely, and that is how.