I ventured to say that I thought it was okay to call them Western musicians if that’s how they thought of themselves at the time, and in any case, we could maybe also learn about their musical genius in addition to whatever troubled times they lived in and the complicated lives they led. The professor responded to this benign statement made in broken English by a young girl who was clearly a recent immigrant by telling me, in front of all my new classmates, that I had likely been “brainwashed.” I wanted to cry—not out of sadness or fear or even embarrassment, but from frustration.
