War & Treaty comment on racist incident at Austin Festival

The war & Treaty have graced award show stages over the past year, received Grammy nominations, and even released their first platinum single. But for artists of color in country and Americana, success and recognition don’t mean they can escape the litany of microaggressions and racist assumptions embedded in those areas of the music industry.

Last weekend, before performing at the Coca-Cola Sips & Sounds Festival in Austin, the couple were surprised to find a cotton plant in their dressing room. The plant was a simple decoration for the green room, but in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, The duo discussed how the work is emblematic of the larger issue facing predominantly white artists in the industry, where they fail to make artists of color feel welcome or safe.

“We went back and forth about whether to comment on this incident,” the band said on Instagram after the story was published. “Ultimately, we knew this issue was bigger than just us.”

In an interview with THRMichael and Tanya Trotter described in detail the cycle of emotions they went through after encountering the cotton plant.

“I felt anger,” said Michael, a veteran. “I felt disrespect. And I felt sadness. Sadness not only because of what this plant means to people who look like me, but also for myself, because I am a son of this land.”

For Tanya, the daughter of a sharecropper, the thoughtless room decoration was a damaging reminder of her family’s past. “It’s not my job to educate anyone about what cotton is and what it represents in this country,” she said. “It just shouldn’t be happening.”

What goes unmentioned is that of the ten artists who played on the main stage during the two-day music festival, The War & Treaty were the only non-white artists amidst a lineup of white artists playing blues, soul and rap. A representative for the Coca-Cola Sips & Sounds Festival did not immediately respond to Rolling StonePlease leave a comment.

The decision to speak out weighed on the group, which is now signed to a major label and has earned a reputation (after trying to shed that reputation) as cultural bridge-builders for good cheer since its 2018 debut. Healing Flood“We are not the Kumbaya cats that people would like to paint us as,” said Michael Trotter Rolling Stone in 2020. “We wanted to consciously focus on healing with Healing Floodbut we may have given the wrong impression when we said we were the healers…We Are the most hopeful cats.”

The band recently released their latest single “Called You By Your Name,” a bluesy-rave song that they played at CMA Fest last month.