If you eliminate all racism from folk music, you essentially eliminate folk music. If you edit and revise folk music to clean out all the racist references music, it's still music, but it isn't folk any more.

Racism, in the sense of being angered by and/or afraid of people who "aren't like us," is pretty much natural to a species that evolved as pack hunters. That's not to defend it, or imply we can't choose to intentionally override it, but it's still part of history if we do.

Or so it's always seemed to me.

P.