The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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Encinia’s actions reveal how white authority figures continue to expect black people to perform more visible, overt, and extreme forms of compliance—through speech, vocal tone, eye contact, and physical behavior—than they ask of white subjects. Unarmed white people who display “noncompliant” behavior do not face violence, punishment, or death at the same rates as black people. An ongoing study by the Guardian finds that police kill black people at twice the rate of white people; black people whom police killed were twice as likely to be unarmed.1 The ability to be audibly annoyed at getting a traffic ticket and live is a contemporary marker of a very old strain of white privilege expressed and embodied through sound.
Silence, on the other hand, offers black people no guaranteed refuge from state and police violence. In October 2015, a young black girl at Spring Valley High School was accused by her teacher of refusing to leave class after using her cell phone; she quietly stared forward at her desk until her school’s “resource officer” grabbed and violently pulled her to the ground, desk and all. After he handcuffed and dragged her across the room, he arrested her for “disturbing the school,” along with Niya Kenny, who had verbally defended her classmate. “I was crying, like literally crying and screaming like a baby,” Kenny described. “I was screaming what the F, what the F, is this really happening. I was praying out loud for the girl.… I was just crying and he was like, ‘Since you have so much to say, you coming, too.… You want some of this?’ And just put my hands behind my back.”2 Rather than hear these black girls as children in need of protection, the teacher and school’s police force transformed the girls’ screams of pain, fearful prayers, and silences into “blackness”: dangerous noise, outsized aggression, and a threatening strength.
These sounds, heard and unheard, have histories. If we listen, we can hear resonances with other times and places: segregation’s hostile soundscapes, the obedient listening that whites expected of slaves, the screams and prayers of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester. Though dispersed by geography, circumstance, and mainstream news coverage insistent that each event is “not about race,” the sonic color line inextricably connects them. This book exists to amplify such echoes until we all hear, acknowledge, and end such additions to America’s resonant racial history. Double-voiced, this book unfolds in solidarity with everyone already hearing and resisting the sonic color line, offering new language and historical insight for the struggle against the deafening silence of so much death. This book listens as it speaks.
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Race in America is a visual phenomenon. Americans have long understood race as expressed through attitudes about skin color and visible phenotypical differences—such as hair texture and lip contour—and the power differentials resulting from an ideological, racialized visual gaze. As Richard Dyer bluntly states in White, “looking and being looked at reproduce racial power relations.”3 When scholars invoke nonvisual idioms of race, they are treated as ancillary to visual indicators rather than as constitutive forces in their own right.
The Sonic Color Line connects sound with race in American culture, showing how listening operates as an organ of racial discernment, categorization, and resistance in the shadow of vision’s alleged cultural dominance. While vision remains a powerfully defining element of race, scholars have yet to account for how other senses experience racialization and enact race feeling, both alone and in concert with sight.4 Neither reifying nor negating vision, this book trumpets the importance of sound, in particular, as a critical modality through which subjects (re)produce, apprehend, and resist imposed racial identities and structures of racist violence. Because racism seems to be a “discourse of power that thinks with the eyes” in a culture driven by an “overdetermined politics of looking,” sound has served as a repository of apprehension, oppression, and confrontation, rendered secondary—invisible—by visually driven epistemologies.5 Far from being vision’s opposite, sound frequently appears to be visuality’s doppelgänger in U.S. racial history, unacknowledged but ever present in the construction of race and the performance of racial oppression.
To understand the entanglements of sound, race, and technology and the far-reaching material consequences of their collusion, The Sonic Color Line presents a cultural and political history detailing when, why, and how listening became a racialized body discipline and how it both informed and was informed by emergent sound technologies. I excavate a century of aural genealogies and a politics of racialized sound to reveal the dynamic relationships between racial ideologies, the development of sound media, and the modern listening practices that shape (and are shaped by) them. Following Kara Keeling, who theorizes “the cinematic” as “a complicated aggregate of capitalist social relations, sensory motor arrangements, and cognitive processes”—at once political, material, sensory, affective, and bodily—I plot a historical narrative that re-enmeshes technology’s function as a material “mechanism and modality” of modernity with archival traces of its less apparent—but, as I will show, no less material—reality as a sensory politics flowing from and in tension with the (black) body.6 I build from studies such as Jonathan Sterne’s that “commingle physics and culture” to challenge instrumental, technologically determinant, and self-evidently triumphant narratives of sound reproduction’s role in American history, with the insistence that its development and trajectory were indelibly shaped by and through the sonic color line’s sonification of race and the racialization of listening.7 The twentieth-century sound reproduction technologies I explore in the second half of the book—sound cinema and radio, respectively—emerged from and developed in tandem with several key corporeal sonic technologies of the nineteenth century—listening, vocal timbre, music writing, phonography, lynching, and the development of the “black voice”—body disciplines enlisted to mediate, embody, and resist the sonic color line, as the book’s opening chapters detail.
The Sonic Color Line begins just before the Civil War, when white Southern elites scrambled to shore up slavery as a natural, inviolable system as it came under fire from white Northern abolitionists, black and white presses, and black activists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Essentialist ideas about “black” sounds and listening offered white elites a new method of grounding racial abjection in the body while cultivating white listening practices as critical, discerning, and delicate and, above all, as the standard of citizenship and personhood. The book pauses on the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement, at the birth of the racial formation of color blindness in the mid-1940s. American society remains bound by the intertwined political and sensory legacies of color blindness, particularly its narratives—optic and ideological—of racial progress, diversity, multiculturalism, and so-called post-race identity. However, Americans continue to hear, feel, think, and experience race, some leading lives invisibly (and audibly) structured by privilege, while so many othered peoples continue to struggle with exclusions, disadvantages, violence, and the added challenge of perpetually proving the impact of something that no longer officially exists. May this book amplify black performers’, writers’, and thinkers’ historical testimony on the sonic color line; provide useful language for critiquing how race impacts perception; and demonstrate how sound and listening enable racism’s evolving persistence.
Like the sounds and resistant practices comprising its focus, this book is diverse and deliberately disruptive. I examine performers who confirmed and strained against the sonic color line. By juxtaposing the racialized reception of their black and white audiences to African American writings from each period, I explore the sonics of black subjectivity and expose modernity’s differential listening practices. I read slave narratives by Douglass and Jacobs as engaged with the operatic performances of Jenny Lind and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield; I listen to echoes of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman; I consider collaborations between Louisiana-born songster turned New York City folk singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter and Mississippi-born sharecropper’s son turned novelist Richard Wright; and I restage a conversation about U.S. radio and race between singer Lena Horne, sociologist and theorist W. E. B. Du Bois, and novelist Ann Petry.
By design, The Sonic Color Line presents neither a seamless history of listening nor an encyclopedic taxonomy; it rather takes a cultural materialist approach to a series of resonant events between slavery and the end of segregation that reveals race to be fundamental to any historical consideration of U.S. listening practices (and vice versa). The Sonic Color Line’s selective case