Immeasurable love and gratitude to my mom, Pinkie, who always took me to the library, listened to my stories, and encouraged me to go to graduate school (even though it was a crazy idea, Mom!); her vegetable soup fueled many of these pages. To my grandma Mema, who read to me and assembled my very first single-authored publications out of the scraps my grandpa brought home from the paper-cup factory. I also thank my aunt Mary Anne, uncle Greg, aunt Mary, sister Jackie, and brother-in-law Steve; I am grateful for the joy my nieces Molly and Megan and nephew Mason have brought. To those who have passed, forever in my heart and in these pages: my dad, Jeff, Grandpa Smokey, Great-Grandma Irene, Grandpa Walt, and Grandma Maryanne. To my son, Martin—for you, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the book! Finally, I thank my dog, He Who Cannot Be Named (2002–2016), for the countless hours he spent stretched out on my office rug, encouraging me to stay put and write. All the treats are his and any mistakes definitely mine.
Portions of chapter 5 appeared as “Fine-tuning the Sonic Color-line: Radio and the Acousmatic DuBois,” in a special issue on radio, in Modernist Cultures 10, no. 1 (2015): 99–118, and in Italian as “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sonic Color-line,” in a special issue on W. E. B. Du Bois, in Studi Culturali (April 2013): 71–88.
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “The Word and the Sound: Listening to the Sonic Color-line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” in SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience (Fall 2011): 20–36.
Theorizations of the sonic color line and the listening ear appeared in nascent form in “Reproducing U.S. Citizenship in a Blackboard Jungle: Race, Cold War Liberalism, and the Tape Recorder,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2011): 781–806, and “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York,” Social Text 102 (Spring 2010): 59–85.
And finally, this book also bears the deep affective traces and influence of Tyisha Miller (1979–1999), a student in the first high school English class I ever taught, and James Martinez (1976–1997), my high school boyfriend’s smart and hilarious cousin, both killed by police in Riverside County. I have mourned them both for almost twenty years now; these photographs remind me they were once so very beautifully, heartbreakingly, brilliantly alive.
While both images still wound, the photograph of Tyisha, in particular, bears symbolic resonance: here she performs as Mama Younger from A Raisin in the Sun alongside her classmates, who eagerly hand her “the first present in her life without it being Christmas,” as Lorraine Hansberry’s stage directions say. In the play, this moment comes as the Younger family ready themselves to leave their squalid tenement apartment to desegregate Chicago’s all-white suburbs. I regret that in that moment, I, then a twenty-one-year-old white woman with a lot to learn, focused far too much on the new possibilities for the Younger family; I did not stress enough the blood, bravery, resistance, and death that paid for such possibilities and the violence of the white perpetrators who certainly awaited the family’s moving van (as they did Hansberry’s own family’s). The joy that Tyisha radiates as she accepts the gift of a new future—shining despite murder and time and my misteachings—haunts and inspires.
Christmas, 1993, Grandma Vera’s House, Riverside, California. James second from left. Photo by author.
May 1996, Rubidoux High School, Riverside, California. Tyisha at center. Photo by author.
I have listened to this snapshot of James and this Polaroid of Tyisha for almost twenty years now, hearing their voices and the unyielding whiteness that silenced them. I will always have a lot to learn, but, at long last, this book amplifies what I have heard these many years. May the photograph infuse the phonograph (and vice versa) with the resistant resonance of the past and the present so that we can listen out toward a future world where children of color thrive and freely share their gifts. A world, at long last, worthy of Tyisha’s smile, with streets safe for James Martinez Junior, now almost as old as his father ever would be, and his spitting image.
Introduction
The Sonic Color Line and the Listening Ear
Michael Dunn “denied calling the rap ‘thug music’ but admitted he thought it was ‘rap-crap’ and that it was ‘ridiculously loud.’ ”
—The Guardian coverage of Dunn’s murder of Jordan Davis at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, November 23, 2012
“Sandra Bland was very combative. It was not a model traffic stop. It was not a model person that was stopped.”
—Waller County’s district attorney, Elton Mathis, defending the actions of Brian Encinia, who pulled Sandra Bland over for failing to signal during a lane change. Bland was found hanged to death in the Waller County Jail on July 13, 2015, three days after her arrest for “assaulting an officer.”
“The student sits quietly at her desk, and remains unresponsive as the officer Ben Fields asks her to come with him. He takes her silence as refusal, at which point he grabs her by the neck, pulls her backward in the desk, forcibly pulls her out of the desk and then slings her body across the classroom. He then yells at her, as she lies prone on the floor, to put her hands behind her back.”
—Brittany Cooper in Salon, on Fields’s violent police attack on a black girl at Spring Valley High School, captured on video on October 26, 2015
We need to talk about listening, power, and race. Willful white mishearings and auditory imaginings of blackness—often state-sanctioned—have long been a matter of life and death in the United States. However, recent events—and large-scale protests testifying to their occurrence and amplifying their impact—have temporarily halted the usual silence surrounding the violent consequences of the racialization of both sound and listening. Toward this end, The Sonic Color Line details the long historical entanglement between white supremacy and listening in the United States, contextualizing recent events such as the deaths of Jordan Davis and Sandra Bland within the ongoing struggle of black people to decolonize their listening practices, exert their freedom to sound in safety, diversity, and solidarity, and shift how they are heard in everyday life and in spaces allegedly public.
Without ever consciously expressing the sentiment, white Americans often feel entitled to respect for their sensibilities, sensitivities, and tastes, and to their implicit, sometimes violent, control over the soundscape of an ostensibly “free,” “open,” and “public” space. When middle-aged white man Michael Dunn murdered seventeen-year-old Davis at a Florida gas station in 2012, for example, he marked his aural territory. Dunn didn’t want to hear hip-hop at the pumps, so he walked to the jeep where Davis and his friends were listening to music and demanded they turn it down. When the teenagers refused, Dunn shot into their car and fled.
In July 2015, white officer Brian Encinia pulled over a twenty-eight-year-old Bland en route to her new job at Prairie View A&M University. When she expressed annoyance, Encinia became angry; he called her noncompliant and commanded her to step out of her car. Bland told him she knew her rights and did not need to exit the vehicle or put her cigarette out. Encinia then told her he would “light [her] up” with his Taser, dragged her from the car, and pulled her along the ground until out of his dashboard camera’s range. After tackling and handcuffing her, Encinia arrested Bland for “assaulting an officer.” Three days later, Bland was found hanged in her cell. As of this writing, Bland’s death remains unresolved; Waller County maintains she committed suicide, while her family