Justice for Black Art
JAMILA THOMAS
SENIOR DIRECTOR OF MARKETING Atlantic Records
BRIANNA AGYEMANG
SENIOR ARTIST CAMPAIGN MANAGER Platoon
AFTER GEORGE FLOYD, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were all killed, music executives Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas were exhausted. So the two friends scheduled a day away from their normal jobs in early June. They created a hashtag, #TheShowMustBePaused, to explain the significance to nonblack colleagues, and chose a Tuesday because they didn’t want to “conduct business as usual without regard for black lives,” they wrote online. Through a game of social media telephone, bystanders started calling the day “Blackout Tuesday” and adopting the message everywhere. More than 721,000 people used the hashtag on Instagram. As attention swelled, music companies ended up offering employees the day off, and the duo put together a Zoom summit that drew nearly 1,500 industry players calling out racism and inequality. Since then, Agyemang and Thomas have been working nonstop to show the music business that it needs to respect black employees if it wants to continue benefiting from black art. They submitted actionable demands in September, asking for, among other things, a thirdparty diversity audit, an annual report on pay disparities as they relate to race and gender, and pipelines for black talent to rise up without being pigeonholed into “urban music” departments. “We are, and we will be, in this fight for the long haul,” the duo promised. S.H.