I feel like there should be a line of intention. The artist described in the article was essentially racist by ignorance. She didn’t really know any Black folks, and fetishized them from afar. Doesn’t excuse her offense entirely, but perhaps ignorance mitigates her offense somewhat.

I was pleasantly surprised that Professor Appiah’s take was so nuanced.

Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness

I feel like this reasoning is a bit fallacious. By definition, ALL music is new when you’re young.

Sure, as a guy in my 50s, my typical shuffle playlist has like 30% of songs on it from when I was a teen, and another 30% or so from ages 20-45. But that’s because my musical tastes have grown somewhat steadily, but I haven’t stopped listening to stuff I used to like either. By simple statistics, the “variance” in my music selections has to go down over time, since I’m not discarding old music from my collection. Some kind of “regression to the musical mean” has to happen as you add more music without removing old music.