The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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I examine musical calls and writerly responses (and writerly calls and musical responses)—across space, time, genre, and medium—as aural performances that together sound out the sonic color line and its impact on American lives. I do not intend my readings to further the neoliberal project of “giving voice to the voiceless” or recovering “lost” sounds. Instead, I make clear how U.S. white supremacy has attempted to suppress, tune out, and willfully misunderstand some sounds and their makers and histories. At the same time, I compel readers to listen deeply to the long history of black agency, resistance, and activism in the face of such silencing.
At once a literary study, performance analysis, cultural history, media study, and critical race theory, this project reveals race’s audible contour—the sonic color line—and gives an account of key instances in its first one hundred years. I employ multiple methods to ask: What is the historical relationship between sonic and visual racial regimes? How have racialized American listening practices—and attendant sonic racial representations—emerged, spread, and changed over time? How has the sonic color line shaped and been shaped by the rise of audio reproduction technologies and representational discourses such as literature, journalism, and music? To address these questions, The Sonic Color Line places African American writers’ and singers’ ongoing conversations about sound and listening alongside the historical trajectory of theories of U.S. racial formation, the progression of sound reproduction technologies, the shifting sonics of white supremacy, American nationalism, and the everyday racial “structure of feeling” in four eras: the antebellum era, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the immediate post–World War II moment.
Through sonically attuned analyses that amplify the aurality of race and the unspoken power of racialized listening, I argue that sound functions as a set of social relations and a compelling medium for racial discourse. Sound has been entangled with vision since the conception of modern ideas of race and it has often operated at the leading edge of the visual to produce racialized identity formations. Overall, The Sonic Color Line interweaves original archival analysis with African American literary study to present a holistic approach to the sonics of race and the historical racialization of listening: I investigate materials from the South and the North across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; I consider the shifting historical relationship between dominant and resistant practices; and I articulate “actual” sounds with textual representations of listening and the auditory imaginary.
To facilitate public conversation about the relationship between sound, race, and American life, I introduce two new concepts: the sonic color line and the listening ear. The sonic color line describes the process of racializing sound—how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds—and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between “whiteness” and “blackness.” The listening ear drives the sonic color line; it is a figure for how dominant listening practices accrue—and change—over time, as well as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms. Through the listening ear’s surveillance, discipline, and interpretation, certain associations between race and sound come to seem normal, natural, and “right.” In the following section, I theorize each term, providing the framework for this book’s interventions into African American literary history, sound studies, popular music study, and critical race theory.
The Sonic Color Line and the Listening Ear
I wrote much of this book in coffee shops; inevitably, people asked me what I was working on. White people, in particular, expressed surprise when I told them that I was writing a book on race and sound. I often received off-the-cuff critiques: What could I, a white American woman born in the post–Civil Rights era, know about race? You can’t see sound, so how could it have a “race”? But when I added that I’m really writing about listening—about how we can hear race—something very telling often happened. “Oh wait a minute,” my white (generally) male interlocutor would say, just before conspiratorially dropping his voice. “I get it! You mean like this!”8 And then, right there in the Starbucks, I’d witness a minstrel show—performances I kept hoping never to hear but that their performers always seemed so eager to give.
Over time, I perfected my part in this American melodrama. “You’re only partly right,” I’d say, shaking my head and delivering some version of the following monologue: “But not for the reason you think. My book is about where and how you learned that voice—how you came to believe it was ‘black,’ why you think it sounds funny and weird and sexual, and how you feel like you own it, so much so that you whip it out to a stranger in a coffee shop. That right there, the fact that you and so many white people have this same ‘black voice’ in their heads, is the sonic color line. And the listening ear explains your erroneous assumption that I would find this voice as funny and weird and sexual as you do because my skin color determines how you think I should listen, what I might want to hear. The listening ear told you to look around and drop your voice to make sure no black person would hear you and lets me know, white person to white person, that we are about to have one of those really white moments together, where we will listen to and feel our whiteness through your impression of this vocal stereotype. I am actually writing my book to call attention to these moments, right here, to show the damage they have done and continue to do, and put a stop to them.”
Sometimes these exchanges led to arguments, sometimes to deep conversations; most often they resulted in silence. Some days I dreaded these moments. Other days, I wished a dude would. “My book is about race,” I’d tell them. “It’s about whiteness. And we know a lot about whiteness—we have been listening to it our whole lives.” Despite the many protests of various coffee shop minstrels, their voices told me they heard it too.
* * *
I am indebted to W. E. B. Du Bois for my concept of the sonic color line, particularly his schema of the visual color line in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his reimagining of that color line as a suffocating plate glass enclosure in Dusk of Dawn (1940).9 Du Bois’s profound intellectual shift in the 1940s—from the veil to the vacuum as his preeminent metaphor for race—accounts for the multisensory experience and auditory affect of race that I now theorize as the sonic color line and the listening ear. Far from the first to consider the sonics of Du Bois’s work, I build from the scholarship of Alexander Weheliye and others to rethink Du Bois’s concept of the veil as an audiovisual entity, one that helps us understand the relationship between sight and sound in the production of racial identity.10 Using the visual metonym of the veil—an image that redounds in African American literature and thought after Souls—Du Bois’s key intervention called out the color line and segregation as causes of social difference, rather than its “inevitable” result, challenging mainstream turn-of-the-twentieth-century discourse on the “Negro problem.”11
Du Bois’s image of the veil stands in for the ideological barrier whites constructed between themselves and black people in U.S. society and the perceptual distortions resulting on either side. It makes palpable the visual representational processes that render black people either invisible or hypervisible, but never truly seen and known. However, the veil’s fundamental visuality invites rather than excludes an engagement with sound, particularly in regard to its evocation of acousmatic phenomena, the emanation of sound from an unseen source.12 Du Bois’s multiply-signifying veil, therefore, comments on race’s ocular politics rather than merely describing them. Critiquing the propensity of European modernity to value evidence produced by the eye over evidence generated by the ear—which, according to Charles Hirschkind, Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant associated with passivity, self-subordination, and emotional misjudgment13—Du Bois asserts that whites’ obsession with looking caused an extreme distortion of vision. Whites cannot see through their veil of race—a product of hundreds of years of their ignorance, misrepresentation, and self-serving violence—and their loss of vision actually enables them to continue dehumanizing black people, characterizing them as abstract, shadowy “problems” rather than individual, rights-bearing subjects, modernity’s sine qua non.
Du Bois noticed the growing connections between race and sound in his second autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, written in the grim years leading up to World War II. Dusk of Dawn opened not with the bold pronouncements of Souls—“the