Giving peers permission to engage in dialogue about race and holding a lofty expectation that they will stay engaged in these conversations throughout the semester or year is the first of the four agreements for courageous conversation. While initially, some participants may be eager to enter into these conversations, our experience indicates that the more personal and thus risky these topics get, the more difficult it is for participants to stay committed and engaged." Singleton and Hays

"Courageous conversation is a strategy for breaking down racial tensions and raising racism as a topic of discussion that allows those who possess knowledge on particular topics to have the opportunity to share it, and those who do not have the knowledge to learn and grow from the experience." Singleton and Hays

"In Colormute, Pollock(2004) makes specific suggestions for addressing the fear of talking about race: “In all conversations about race, I think, educators should be prepared to do three things:ask provocative questions, navigate predictable debates,and talkmore about talking”(p. 221, italics in original)"

"Music education students enter universities from diverse backgrounds that include musical experiences in “subaltern” musical practices (rock bands, music theatre, hip hop, and other genres). After four years or so in the institutional environment, we send them out to the world somehow convinced that what they ought to be teaching is the Western canon."

"Taking the risk of talking about race is important both for the future of music education as a discipline, and for our students who look to us for guidance on their journeys to becoming music educators. Until we are able to break the silence that maintains music education’s complicity in perpetuating racism by leaving whiteness the undisturbed and undisputed cultural norm, our concerns about social justice in music education will amount to little more than lip service."

"Although in the United States it is common to use the term multiculturalism to refer to both liberal forms of multiculturalism and to describe critical multicultural pedagogies, in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other areas,anti-racism refers to those enactments of multiculturalism grounded in critical theory and pedagogy. The term anti-racism makes a greater distinction, in my opinion, between the liberal and critical paradigms of multiculturalism, and is one of the reasons I find the anti-racism literature useful for analyzing multiculturalism in music education."

"Many North American music education programs exclude in vast numbers students who do not embody Euroamerican ideals. One way to begin making music education programs more socially just is to make them more inclusive. For that to happen, we need to develop programs that actively take the standpoint of the least advantaged, and work toward a common good that seeks to undermine hierarchies of advantage and disadvantage. And that, inturn, requires the ability to discuss race directly and meaningfully. Such discussions afford valuable opportunities to confront and evaluate the practical consequences of our actions as music educators. It is only through such conversations, Connell argues, that we come to understand “the real relationships and processes that generate advantage and disadvantage”(p. 125). Unfortunately, these are also conversations many white educators find uncomfortable and prefer to avoid."

"I am also concerned that despite the best of intentions many of us have not considered adequately what social justice means and entails. I worry that social justice may become simply a “topic du jour” in music education, a phrase easily cited and repeated without careful examination of the assumptions and actions it implicates. That can lead to serious misunderstandings."