The Black Business Association Salute to Black Music Awards Dinner is scheduled for June 20, 2017 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. With respect for the Black Business Association, honorary chair Quincy Jones and honorees Clarence Avant and Lee Bailey, Black Music Month is a self-serving industry creation to inflate record sales in only popular music, without consideration to achievements by people of African descent in classical and opera music. Similar to the NAACP Image Awards, the annual salute perpetuates or reinforces the false belief that classical and opera music are White genres. While the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Metropolitan Opera and other significant institutions cast, book, and showcase first-class international talent of color, they are being betrayed by Black organizations fostering limited racial pride. The current concept of Black Music Month does not show the full range of achievements by people of color and denies our children images of the full range of their human potential.
Black Music Month should be changed to Blacks in All Music Month. See soprano Latonia Moore.
