The War & Treaty have spent the last year gracing award show stages, garnering Grammy nominations, and even earning their first-ever platinum single. But for artists of color in the country and Americana space, success and acclaim doesn’t mean escaping the litany of microaggressions and racist assumptions built into these spaces of the music industry. Last weekend, before performing at the Coca-Cola Sips & Sounds Festival in Austin, the husband-and-wife duo encountered a startling sight in their dressing room: a cotton plant.
The plant was simple green room decoration, but in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter , the duo discussed the ways in which the plant represented a larger issue of predominantly white spaces in the industry failing to make artists of color feel welcome or safe. “We went back and forth, wondering if we should speak out on this incident,” the band said on Instagram, after the story’s publication. “Ultimately, we knew this issue was bigger than just us.
” In the interview with THR , Michael and Tanya Trotter detailed the cycle of emotions they were forced to feel after encountering the cotton plant. “Anger is what I felt,” said Michael, a veteran. “Disrespect is what I felt.
Sadness is what I felt. Sadness not just because of what that plant represents to people that look like me but sadness for myself because I am a son of this country.” For Tanya, the daughter of a sharecropper, the thoughtless room decoration served as a ha.
