Today Boiler Room issued an apology for editing comments about race out of their recent Glasgow New Wave documentary.
The music broadcasting platform faced criticism earlier this week for the editing choice, which removed DJ Sarra Wild’s comments from the doc, saying Glasgow was “no longer a white man’s techno scene.” The quote had an appeared in a previous unpublished version of the documentary that Wild had screened.
In their apology, Boiler Room state that Wild’s line was something they’d intended to open the documentary with, but “a number of other contributors came back to the producer to say they weren’t comfortable appearing in a piece framed with that comment but that didn’t explore the complex issue of race beyond those two words.”
The team behind the doc ultimately decided to cut the line, a move that Boiler Room now admit “inadvertently reinforced a discourse where the perspectives of marginalized people are erased, while turning up the volume on the inequality and everyday discrimination so prevalent across the music industry.”
The apology goes on to read, “we’d like to apologize to the contributor whose words were edited, to anyone else offended or upset by what happened, and to the people reading about this for the first time in this post.”
Referring directly to their initial response to the criticisms Wild had raised, Boiler Room added that “we also want to apologize for the tone of the initial email our head of film sent to explain what had happened to the contributor– it was very defensive, lacking the sensitivity and professionalism required to approach a difficult and hurtful situation.”
Looking forward, they say that they’ve organized “training for our editorial staff that tackles these issues and are establishing an equality committee within Boiler Room which will proactively monitors how truly practice here stays to our beliefs, providing a constructive environment for airing of important issues internally and to aid continual learning for us all on these critical topics.”
They say they’d like to begin work on a project that will take a closer look at the issues of race and gender in music that they originally cut out, and asked those interested to get in touch.
You can read the entire apology below.
[protected-iframe id=”9432144ac7b69ba5ded9a41645007292-60970621-76566046″ info=”https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fboilerroom.tv%2Fposts%2F1557950790917293%3A0&width=500″ width=”500″ height=”588″ frameborder=”0″ style=”border: none; overflow: hidden;” scrolling=”no”]
