For forty years, American orchestras have run diversity fellowship programs. For forty years, their own research has documented that those programs rarely lead to permanent employment. Nothing has changed.

BON's third open letter, Dear American Orchestras III, names what those forty years actually produced — and proposes a different architecture for what investment in Black orchestral musicians should look like. In this episode of Black Music Seen, violist and BON Director of Projects Emilio Carlo and cultural anthropologist Dr. Lexi Ligon Holloway break down what the letter found, what it's asking for, and what it costs a musician to navigate a system that marks their presence as perpetually provisional.

This conversation belongs in the record because the musicians who lived these programs are still living the aftermath.