Racialized Reviews and Harmful Headlines

Just two weekends ago, Harvard undergraduates got a free concert featuring a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, and producer — Jeremih.

Yet the response to this star-headlined, all-expenses-paid show was “mixed” — at least according to The Crimson. Some interviewed students felt that Jeremih’s brief set did not satisfy the build up of Yardfest; others were simply unfamiliar with his music.

Given that Jeremih’s award-winning work is hip hop and R&B — musical genres traditionally associated with Black artists — we can’t help but wonder whether this “mixed” response reflects a broader issue: the Harvard community’s covert racialized conception of fun and campus culture.

We do not mean that Harvard students seeking a night off are racist. But we notice a troubling pattern on campus where students enjoy consuming Black music and culture when it’s trending or mainstream — but forgo a bare minimum level of cultural appreciation and respect when it’s not.

Sometimes, “trending” is just code for white-adjacent, making this phenomenon even more insidious. Take last year’s Yardfest headliner, Swae Lee, a Black hip-hop artist whose set won significantly better reviews from students — again, at least according to The Crimson. Is this because Swae Lee is the significantly superior singer? Or is it because his most popular song, “Sunflower,” not only featured in the blockbuster film “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” but also stars Post Malone, a popular white artist?

We suspect the latter. Music considered to have widespread appeal often caters to a culture that spotlights whiteness — a culture that ends up shafting Black communities and artistic expression.

Selectively embracing Black culture — only when it’s conveniently close to a white norm — is a pervasive campus-wide trend that has bled into this very newspaper’s own coverage. The Crimson’s headline about Yardfest this year pulled a quote from an interview to describe the concert as “Jere-mid”: an egregious use of African American Vernacular English to discredit the work of a Black man.

Tracing out the origins of language is a difficult task, yes, but we work in the business of language. For this offensive headline to go from conception through editing to publication without a single internal flag being raised reeks of a seeming total lack of sensitivity paid to the usage of AAVE and the experiences of Black students on campus.

Either The Crimson deliberately chose to unfairly highlight an unusually negative viewpoint in the headline of an article on a varied response, or Harvard’s culture is so saturated with disregard towards Black culture that no Harvard student involved saw a problem.

We can have fun without being culturally insensitive. Making Yardfest a festivity worth celebrating starts with us, as students, cultivating an appreciation for a broad palette of cultures. It is our responsibility to examine and prevent underhand prejudices from clouding our minds before the concert even begins. Cultural learning should happen even outside of the classroom.

Students should also take the time to familiarize themselves with an artist’s discography before hearing them live: Concert etiquette involves learning an artist’s songs before the show, in order to appreciate the performance even more. With the Yardfest lineup announcement coming a solid week before the actual event, students should have a significant amount of time to ‘study up’ on any music they’re unfamiliar with.

Administrators have an important role to play in facilitating fun, too. They should schedule Yardfest earlier in the weekend so that everyone can join in wholeheartedly on the entertainment, without the looming worry of their Monday 9 a.m. classes.

We are truly thankful for Jeremih for coming to Harvard and performing for our student body; we hope he enjoyed his time here and are grateful that he shared his Grammy-nominated talent with us. To future Yardfest headliners: We hope that the ungracious and biased criticisms of Jeremih, as presented in The Crimson’s coverage, don’t deter you from coming to perform; we’d still love to have you.

But until next Yardfest, our campus must reckon with how it treats Black culture. Our collective status quo — not the College Events Board’s choice in headliners — is the real culprit worth criticizing.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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