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 studies amplify an ongoing historical conversation between black writers and musical performers about listening’s role in black selfhood, agency, citizenship, and racial discrimination. 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
