The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
of intractable racism and violence, made palpable by what seemed in the late 1930s to be the apex of white supremacy in both theory and praxis. With admirable yet wrenching self-critique, Du Bois seriously questions Souls’ assertion that the color line could be breached by a “series of brilliant assaults” on racism’s fundamentally flawed logic. Any literary, artistic, or political project challenging race, Dusk of Dawn warns, will be gravely complicated by the fact that whites not only have been conditioned to see and hear the world differently but also have labeled and propagated this sensory configuration as universal, objective truth. To explain the persistence of race, Du Bois uses the figure of the plate glass vacuum chamber, where the color line, invisible to the eye, manifests itself as a transparent wall. While white and black people remain visible to each other, no sound penetrates the walls. The white people on the outside laugh and point at the trials and tribulations of the black people inside, who are “screaming in the vacuum, unheard.”15
Du Bois’s notion of the visible color line has long had an aural echo, the resonances of which I theorize as the sonic color line. The sonic color line is both a hermeneutics of race and a marker of its im/material presence. It enables listeners to construct and discern racial identities based on voices, sounds, and particular soundscapes—the clang and rumble of urban life versus suburban “peace and quiet,” for instance—and, in turn, to mobilize racially coded batteries of sounds as discrimination by assigning them differential cultural, social, and political value. The sonic color line produces, codes, and polices racial difference through the ear, enabling us to hear race as well as see it. It is a socially constructed boundary that racially codes sonic phenomena such as vocal timbre, accents, and musical tones. On one level, the sonic color line posits racialized subject positions like “white,” “black,” and “brown” as historical accretions of sonic phenomena and aural stereotypes that can function without their correlating visual signifiers and often stand in for them, as in the case of the coffee shop minstrel. Through multiple simultaneous processes of dominant representation—as this book’s journalistic, literary, and phonographic evidence will show—particular sounds are identified, exaggerated, and “matched” to racialized bodies. For example, Nina Eidsheim argues that white listeners’ visual constructions of race in the nineteenth century shifted the sound of black voices, creating a distorted aural effect she calls “sonic blackness.” Lisa Gitelman describes how early recording technologies ushered in a new era of blackface minstrelsy in which “sounding black” became more important for white performers than applying burnt cork, positing music as “another possible substance of intrinsic racial difference.”16 White-constructed ideas about “sounding Other”—accents, dialects, “slang,” and extraverbal utterances, as well as ambient sounds—have flattened the complex range of sounds actually produced by people of color, marking the sonic color line’s main contour.
This book examines how American culture polices the sonic color line at the level of representation, where political powers affix meaning. Representations have a profound role in shaping thoughts, bodies, even notions of reality itself. Racial ideologies are (re)produced through the representational structures of discourse, aural imagery, and performance. While “sounding black” remains linked to looking black, a process I discuss in this book, aural ideas of “blackness” can also trump notions of authenticity proffered via visible phenotype. White radio actors Freeman Fisher Gosden and Charles Correll played the neominstrel characters Amos and Andy, but black actor Frank Wilson was not hired to narrate the 1941 radio program Freedom’s People because he sounded “too much like a white man” to both white and black producers.17 These examples point to the instability of sound as a racial determinant and the possibility of crossing the sonic color line; they also highlight that there are very definite ideas “matching” racialized bodies to sounds in U.S. culture. Aural and visual signifiers of race are thoroughly enmeshed; sounds never really lose their referent to different types of bodies despite being able to operate independently of them.
Whiteness, on the other hand, is notorious for representing itself as “invisible”—or in this case, inaudible (at least to white people).18 The inaudibility of whiteness stems from its considerably wider palette of representation and the belief that white representations stand in for “people” in general, rather than “white people” in particular. The inaudibility of whiteness does not mean it has no sonic markers, but rather that Americans are socialized to perceive them as the keynote of American identity.19 As dominant listening practices discipline us to process white male ways of sounding as default, natural, normal, and desirable—more on this in a moment—they deem alternate ways of listening and sounding aberrant and—depending upon the historical context—as excessively sensitive, strikingly deficient, or impossibly both.
While never seeming to speak its own name, white sonic identity imagines itself against circumscribed representations of how people of color sound. The binary hierarchy of proper/improper marks one border of the sonic color line; the socially constructed divisions between sound/noise and quiet/loud mark two others. For example, the sonic color line enables particular brands of white speech to become “standard English,” as I examine via Charles Chesnutt’s short stories in chapter 3 and radio historiography in chapter 5. The sonic color line amplifies the “propriety” of standard white speech, as opposed to—and perpetually threatened by—dialects, accents, and “improper” slang attributed to immigrants and/or people of color. Whiteness’s entanglement with “correct speech” has direct material effects, particularly in housing and employment opportunities, as sociologist John Baugh’s linguistic profiling research has determined.20
The sonic color line also codifies sounds linked to racialized bodies—such as music and the ambient sounds of everyday living—as “noise,” sound’s loud and unruly “Other.”21 Noise is not merely loudness measured in decibels. Like recordist and theorist Tony Schwartz, I maintain that noise depends on the ear of the beholder. “Noise is an editorial word,” Schwartz argues. “When you talk about noise, you are talking about sound that is bothering you. There’s no party so noisy as the one you’re not invited to.”22 I consider noise a shifting analytic that renders certain sounds—and the bodies that produce and consume them—as Other, what Cornel West describes as “incomprehensible and unintelligible” under white supremacist epistemologies.23 While cultural uses of “noise” are not exclusive to race—the noise of industry, for example, or of sporting events—I refer specifically to how the sonic color line invokes noise in direct connection to (or as a metonymic stand-in for) people of color, and particularly blackness. The sound of hip-hop pumped at top volume through car speakers, for example, has become a stand-in for the bodies of young black men in American culture; noise ordinances seeking to “tame the boom car monster”—words used in Rochester, New York—allow for racial profiling without ever explicitly mentioning race.24 Sometimes tolerated, but more often fetishized as exotic or demonized as unassimilable, noise and loudness frequently function as aural substitutes for and markers of race and form key contours of the sonic color line that I map out in this book: music/noise (throughout), word/sound, sense/nonsense (chapter 1), cultivated/raw, controlled/excessive (chapter 2), proper/improper, assimilable/foreign, listener/performer (chapter 3), quiet/loud, smooth/rough (chapter 4), and cold/emotional (chapter 5).
To expose the historical genealogy of dominant listening practices and to provide new critical tools to deconstruct and dismantle “race” via its sonic register, I offer the listening ear as the ideological filter shaped in relation to the sonic color line. The listening ear represents a historical aggregate of normative American listening practices and gives a name to listening’s epistemological function as a modality of racial discernment. An aural complement to and interlocutor of the gaze, the listening ear is what Judith Butler calls “a constitutive constraint”25: a socially constructed ideological system producing but also regulating cultural ideas about sound. The listening