I've started reading Ira Gitler's "Swing to Bop: An oral history of the tradition in jazz in the 1940s." Gitler was a witness to the new trends in jazz in the mid-late 1940s, namely bebop, and in 1985 he released a book documenting the transition. In the book, he writes this about society in 1985:
The young black audience, which no longer supports jazz the way it once did (for a variety of reasons, including the cultural genocide of radio), was into bebop in the big cities above the Mason-Dixon Line.
With regards to the radio line - My guess is that he's referring to how the vast majority of social capital in America, owned by white people, played out through radio as well as other aspects of life, with white producers and white DJs disproportionately choosing either white artists or the most marketable new black music (which, by the early 50s, would NOT be bebop, and then quickly would also be mostly popularized by white artists again, a la Elvis and rock music).
I'm wondering if anyone can provide a little more context here though, and if anyone has a recommended resource (book, journal article, etc) that details radio's role in white supremacy (again, I'm just guessing here), it would be great to list it!
(note: this is a repost as my first submission had a major typo in the title.)
I'm not entirely sure what Gitler is talking about there; I can't find any other specific references to 'cultural genocide' in regard to radio and African-American culture, except basically references to Gitler's book using the term. It's not a generally accepted phenomenon in the discussion of jazz, and I think the wording is likely hyperbole.
Broadly speaking, in the post-swing era, jazz is very often considered as a kind of African-American classical music, with the likes of Duke Ellington composing extended ambitious works that used a different language to European classical music but which approached it in sophistication, and with the arrival of the bebop style making for a particularly complex and cerebral kind of music (which was beloved by the Beat writers/beatniks of the 1950s like Jack Kerouac). During the 1950s and 1960s there was something of an ecosystem within the American music scene which supported, essentially, ambitious African-American jazz music, with say, record labels like Verve or Blue Note, radio stations devoted to jazz, and the magazine Downbeat meaning that people interested in complex, cerebral jazz could discover new examples of it.
The rise of 'rock' music in the mid-to-late 1960s changed all of that, and both black and white American cultures moved away from jazz as being the style of music which was best suited to express ambitious, modernist, music within; as a result, you see the rise of, for example, progressive rock, and controversies about, for example, Miles Davis moving towards a strongly rock- and funk- influenced sound in the late 1960s (e.g., albums like Bitches Brew or On The Corner), which used electric instruments, effects and amplification. From there, in the 1970s, jazz was either increasingly classicist or was 'jazz fusion'-oriented, with groups like Weather Report and musicians like Grover Washington Jr. incorporating soul-funk influences into jazz. Towards the late 1970s, and especially into the 1980s, jazz radio stations, in particular, began to play a format that revolved around 'smooth jazz', the genre of increasingly white, and increasingly bland musicians like David Sanborn and Kenny G.
I'm not entirely sure what exactly Gitler means by 'the cultural genocide of radio', but within this roadmap of jazz's commercial decline, there's two things that I think he could be referring to. The most obvious is the rise of 'smooth jazz' I just mentioned, which meant that jazz-focused radio stations stopped playing very much in the world of post-bop jazz forms. The other would be, simply, that African-American focused radio stations in the US never really focused on jazz at all after World War II, instead focusing on, broadly, 'rhythm & blues' - a more dance-oriented style of music which kept jazz's swing in a lot of cases, but was generally not aimed at being cerebral and ambitious - we're talking Ray Charles, B.B. King, Motown, Otis Redding, etc. Gitler may regard these radio stations' lack of support for bebop and post-bop forms of music as being 'cultural genocide' in the sense that those radio stations focusing on other music meant that bebop and its successors never received the support in the African-American communities that they deserved.
(Both Ben Yagoda's The B-Side and Matt Brennan's When Genres Collide are good recent books dealing with the fall of jazz commercially/culturally, from different angles).