Country Music Against White Supremacy (CMAWS) is a group of BIPOC and white musicians, fans, and industry professionals committed to both fighting white supremacy within country music and using country music to fight white supremacy.
Past projects include:
• The #ChangeCountry Pledge
• “How does country music use nostalgia to help keep white supremacy in place?”, a panel at the 2021 Country Soul Songbook Summit
Country music is often about remembering. But what exactly does the country music industry want us to remember? And what does it want to ensure we forget? One of the deeper ways that country music has helped to keep white supremacy in place is through the industry’s special brand of nostalgia. Professors Francesca Royster, Nadine Hubbs, and Charles Hughes and Karen Pittelman of Karen & the Sorrows will take a hard look at the political work nostalgia does by analyzing a series of country songs—and without sparing their faves. We will also think about how Linda Martell explains that country music is “really all about remembering, knowing what has been, and what is, and what can be” and what kind of radical possibilities emerge when this music starts remembering—and reckoning with—the violent, racist American past and present that the country music industry would prefer we forget.
• Using Country Music to Organize Against White Supremacy, short film made for the 2020 Country Soul Songbook Summit. It looks at some of the possibilities of using country music to organize against white supremacy.
• “Another Country: On the relationship between country music and white supremacy—and what we can do about it,” an essay published in 2018.
• Another Country Festival, 2016
What is white supremacy? Why use such a heavy word? Because it’s the right word to describe what we’re talking about. Here are two quotes that might be helpful:
“By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”
—David Gillborn, quoted in Vann R. Newkirt II, “The Language of White Supremacy: Narrow Definitions of the Term Actually Help Continue the Work of the Architects of the Post-Jim Crow Racial Hierarchy,” The Atlantic, October 6, 2017.
“When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs, even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they profess to wish to see eradicated.”
—bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), 113.