Is folk racist? This question comes up fairly often when I’m talking to people about my work. I’m standing there giving my spiel about the radical potential of the stuff we make, do and think for ourselves, and at a certain point someone—a white person—who has been smiling along as though they might be convinced, pauses and looks a bit uncomfortable. ‘But isn’t folk a bit…racist?’ they ask.

It’s a tricky thing for me to address, as someone who does not experience racism. I know that it makes me sad that it’s something so closely associated with the thing I love so much, but I also understand where the perception comes from and know that we absolutely cannot hide from it. And while I much prefer to centralise the voices of those living with present and generational racial trauma and injustice (I welcome that here too, if anybody wants to share), I also feel it’s not up to marginalised folks to tackle this alone, and as a white, English woman who still has much to learn, here’s my tentative response to the question, when I’m asked.

There’s two parts to it.

Part 1 is to reiterate that folk as a phenomenon is inherently diverse and conceptually inclusive *even if its spaces are not*. I say this because, for me, ‘folk’ does not speak to a singular and specific genre, community, aesthetic or body of materials, but rather represents a way of being and engaging in the world. It’s about exercising the right (the imperative) to create and self-organise outside of institutions, on our own terms, and there are SO many more things that might be included beneath that umbrella than those currently identified as such.

So it is as reductive to say that folk is racist as it would be to say that folk is always non- or antiracist. Folk is huge and contains multitudes, good, bad and everything in between. For better or worse, it includes EVERYONE.

Of course, in practice, ‘folk’ IS most often used synonymously with the communities of interest which built themselves around the term, both here and internationally. If we’re talking about the ‘folk scene’ or ‘folk revival’ in England then it is absolutely our job to interrogate and counter any elements of racism (or sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism etc.) that we might find there—just as we should in any of the spaces we inhabit. Growing up with folk music, I knew it as a welcoming, inclusive, predominantly left-leaning community, but it absolutely had—and still has—its failings and dead angles, and some people within it are more resistant to facing up to that than others. There will always be work still to do and white folks are especially charged with doing it. 

Part 2 is harder because it hits at what is probably the core of the question: whether it is inherently problematic to emphasise some form of place- or origins-based identity—particularly if your predominant origins are with the dominant, ruling culture. The practice of folk can be undeniably territorial: my traditions may not look like yours, and in performing them, I may also reinforce their boundaries—and my own. For those with marginalised identities, this can be a potent act of resistance and celebration, but for the powerful, it can be HUGELY oppressive.

At the same time time, a tendency to look backwards, whether to the romantic ‘imagined village’ created by 19th-century theorists, or an even more fancifully-drawn ancient past, cannot help but suggest nostalgia for a ‘better’, ‘simpler’ time, before mass migration, when Britannia ‘ruled the waves’. My (East) German partner still bawks at anything smacking of the ‘völkisch’ or ‘volksgeist’—and for good reason: this stuff has been an engine-room for nationalism and fascism since forever.

So what to do? Walking around the Venice Biennale the other week, whose curatorial framing, ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ invited a range of representations and manifestations of folk arts and heritage, especially by those who are minoritised in the places they live, I wondered if the recent boom of all things English folk might be more charitably interpreted as an endeavour to find a kinder past amidst our bloodthirsty history of colonialism and imperialism, and a kinder present in the chaos and division of the now. Folk can be racist, but it can also be anti-racist, in the most active sense of that term. We can use our self-organising to create more barriers between us, or we can use it to knock them down.

And so my advice to novice folk artists and practitioners is to draw respectfully from the diversity of cultures that surround us RIGHT NOW. We do not have to look backwards. We do not have to assert an exclusive identity and keep everybody else out. We can create new traditions that include everyone and speak truth to power and model the values we want to pass on to our children. And we can grow and rework our historical practices to ensure they are contextually-situated and welcoming. It’s like the breaking of generational trauma—the bad stuff can stop with us. 

Folk isn’t inherently racist (or sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist) but our society is. And we can be part of dismantling that shit, or not. That’s on us. 

—Lucy Wright, August 2024