African-Americans created a potent American subculture built around elements of African expressive and social practice transported transmuted transformed and transubstantiated into the New World. Unfortunately, an element of oppositional trickeration persists in some versions of African-American identity. And all too often Black Pride is created in part by putting a negative sign in front of the attitudes, practices, and accomplishments of self-styled Whiteness. That would be imitating the worst of European civilization. And I think we have paradigms for that.
Jazz is one paradigm. . . .
He just played his music and people listened. Because it was building on a tradition that didn't put whiteness on a pedestal, nor did it put whiteness in the gutter. He actually believed that white people were simply human beings like everybody else. You see, for oppressed people that is hard to admit. Because the propensity is to demonize or deify.