the path to equal citizenship and the achievement of the American Dream as straight and true, even as gross inequities and invisible barriers knocked people of color widely off course. Finally, I amplify Petry’s contributions to a black radio critique. Whereas Horne’s vocal phrasing offered an example of black artistic agency contra the sonic color line and Du Bois’s letters and theories the agency of the writer/producer, Petry’s fiction evokes the trope of the listener to interrogate the agency of black audiences and their efforts to decolonize their listening and disrupt the sonic color line’s (and radio’s) deleterious silences. Thinking these artists together illustrates that if color lines are heard—not just seen—the listening ear continues to operate in covert and extralegal ways, even when a society enacts laws turning a “blind eye” to perceived racial difference.
Reconsidering racialization as a sonic practice allows for a deeper understanding of why both race and racism persist, even as “color-blind” formations of race infuse federal law and political pundits insist America is a “post-racial” nation in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency. Although scholars of race have roundly challenged color blindness,66 it remains the United States’ dominant ideology. The Sonic Color Line argues that American proponents of color blindness have been able to declare race invisible in the twenty-first century precisely because dominant listening practices grounded in antebellum slavery and shaped by segregation continue to render it audible. In what follows, I jam the sonic color line’s aural signals, enabling more equitable listening practices to emerge.
1.
The Word, the Sound, and the Listening Ear
Listening to the Sonic Color Line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents
On July 15, 1836, the Greensborough Patriot published an advertisement seeking information on two runaway slaves. The ad’s writer, a John W. McGehee, asks readers to join him in searching for
two negro men, Solomon and Abram, Solomon is a man twenty years old—black complexion; full face; large mouth; thick lips; coarse voice, large feet; with a burn on his back, received when small—six feet high—well made,—smiles when spoken to—took with him a cloak and frock cloth coat, velvet collar. Abram is about five feet six inches high; black complexion; pert when spoken to; strait[sic], well made man; 26 or 7 years of age; small feet,—fine voice.
Far from unusual, the ad exemplifies the grotesque catalogs commonly printed in Southern newspapers that performatively transformed black subjects into what Hortense Spillers calls “the zero degree of flesh.”1 And one finds several racialized sonic descriptors, tucked away matter-of-factly amongst the litany of white-authored visual stereotypes of “blackness.” Cast by the author as simply another “negro” trait to itemize, sonic qualities such as a “fine voice” were, for mid-nineteenth-century whites, becoming as material and identifiable an element of blackness as the already culturally embedded “black complexion,” “large mouth,” and “thick lips.” A keyword search of the University of North Carolina’s digital archive of runaway slave ads reveals the ubiquity and iterative quality of such descriptions, with “hoarse voice” first appearing in 1777, and “fine voice” in 1783, with a sharp increase in 1811 that rises throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Other key recurrent descriptors include “loud,” “manly,” “strong,” and/or “whiny,” sonic affects amplifying the gendered binary of race for black men as hypermasculine/feminized. The frequency of such ads suggests white people began perceiving a clear (and rather blunt) difference between the timbral qualities of black and white voices in the nineteenth century. The culturally constructed sonic difference not only marked certain tones, grains, and cadences as “black” but also, by the comparison that ghosts these ads, suggests whites sensed their voices as normative and not easily categorizable. White vocal grains, it seems, could span a range of sounds that were neither “coarse” nor as “loud” or “strong” as “fine” black voices, terms that characterize black timbres as excessive, overly corporeal, and readily describable.
In addition to racializing vocal timbre, the Greensborough Patriot outlines distinct, observable differences that whites perceived between black and white listening practices. Whereas whites, by implication, may have any number of reactions to being “spoken to,” McGehee limited Solomon and Abram’s listening stances to visible signals of obeisance: “smiles” and a “pert” snapping to attention. Notably, McGehee’s ad never imagines either Solomon or Abram as speaking first, identifying the breaking of silence as a sonic privilege of whiteness and revealing how slaveholding whites imagined power flowing directly through acts of disciplined listening. White-authored descriptions of their slaves’ racialized and power-laden listening countenances appear frequently and consistently in UNC’s digital archive; recurrent modifiers that appear either before or after the phrase “when spoken to” in runaway slave ads printed between 1792 and 1840 include having “down eyes” or a “downcast look,” being either “slow of speech” or “speaking quick”—the former suggesting modesty in the face of commanding whiteness and the latter displaying rapid deference—or showing a “smiling” or a “pleasant countenance.” Only rarely do slave masters describe slaves as laughing when spoken to, or looking whites “directly in the eye,” signifying a less-than-submissive listening stance and highlighting how whites read pert smiles and downcast eyes as appropriate visual performances of “black” listening.
Mid-nineteenth-century American whites increasingly used auditory information to inform racial ideologies and to construct racialized identities. Visual fragmentations that dissected black people into metonymic corporeal parts such as “wooly hair, nose flat, lips thick,” catalogued in 1854’s widely read The Races of Man, had long signified the allegedly fixed racial differences justifying slavery’s existence.2 However, as Michael Chaney points out, the trajectory of the “dissolution of the eminence of vision” intersected with “an alternate dynamics of race and vision” fostered by new modes of self-representation by free blacks and former slaves.3 Furthermore, as Jonathan Crary argues, the rise of commodity culture and ocular-illusion-as-entertainment (i.e., the panorama and the camera obscura) further destabilized visual epistemologies.4
Sound both defined and performed the tightening barrier whites drew between themselves and black people, expressing the racialized power dynamics and hierarchical relationships of chattel slavery through vocal tones, musical rhythms, and expressed listening practices marked by whites as “black” and therefore of lesser value and potentially dangerous to whiteness and the power structures upholding it. Functioning as a medium, sound enabled race to be felt, experienced, and affected by white Americans as a collection of fixed sonic desires and repulsions that are taken into the body and radiate out from it. White American elites’ use of racialized sonic descriptors drew on a long but spotty history of linking sound to “Otherness” in pre-nineteenth-century America—the “disjointed aural communities” detailed by Richard Cullen Rath in How Early America Sounded that unevenly represented indigenous peoples, Quakers, and African slaves as “howling” outsiders.5 However, the advent of mass print media and popular musical culture enabled white elites to standardize sonic ideas of Otherness on a heretofore-unimagined scale, disciplining readers’ listening practices through detailed accounts of listening experiences written by an increasingly professionalized cadre of reporters and critics. Furthermore, white elite discourse increasingly amplified and Othered “black” sounds at a moment of great anxiety over defining Americanness amid sectional tensions over slavery.
At this key historical threshold, white elites’ published descriptions of the differences between white and black speech, sounds, environments, and musics spread far beyond intimate speech communities, constructing whites’ centrality and dominance as the American citizen-subjects at the very level of perception. Even as the nation appeared to be dissolving in the 1850s, white elites represented a powerful sensory experience of racialized sonic citizenship on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, a phenomenon that certainly contributed to a relatively speedy reconciliation between Northern and Southern
