Arts curricula hold unique potential to foster intercultural learning by engaging students’ diverse cultural knowledges, experiences, and creative resources in ways that promote intercultural understanding. When music is considered as a contextualised socio-political and cultural practice, a broader understanding of why humans make music that goes beyond a focus on sounds and sound-relationships is possible. The theoretical foundations for such understandings of music making are well established, yet have not had a significant impact on music education curricula in the Global North. In this presentation, we position music education as a site for cultivating anti-racist dispositions and racial literacy, where students and teachers can critically reflect on their own identities, histories, and positions within systems of power. Drawing from culturally responsive pedagogy, critical race theory, intersectionality, and emerging work in decolonising race theory, we propose a framework for anti-racist learning in music, grounded in teacher reflexivity, strength-based understandings of culture, and truth-telling about the material consequences of oppression. Through the use of ‘narrative arcs’ we illustrate how the study of varied musics can be connected by unifying threads, examining not only the sounds themselves, but the contextualised meanings inherent in the musical practice. We demonstrate how such an approach to music education may be enacted, fostering deeper engagement with the social meanings of music making, and supporting the development rich intercultural understandings.