Afterword

“I had a student email me and he said, ‘There’s invisible flashing white-only signs everywhere!’ ”

—Nia Nunn Makepeace, Ithaca College, New York, Black Lives Matter Teach-In, October 24, 2015. Over 1,000 students marched in a protest calling for a no-confidence vote for IC President Tom Rochon on November 11, 2015.

“We do not speak ‘Yo’ or ‘Bro’ here” and “We do not play rap, hip hop or R&B here.”

—Signs that hung for years at Dillinger’s Bar and Grill, Binghamton, New York, removed in November 2013 following protest marches by community members and Broome Community College and Binghamton University students and faculty

“That’s how I speak, you cannot hear me that well.”

—Earwitness to Trayvon Martin’s murder Rachel Jeantel to Don West, defense attorney representing George Zimmerman, July 2013

I wrote this book to name and explain how racism works through sound and how American listening habits are shaped by our experiences as raced subjects and by dominant ideologies of “correct,” “proper,” and “sensitive” listening. I wanted to provide a thorough historical context and genealogy for the sonic color line’s stereotypes—the “deep” black voice, the “noisy” neighborhood, the “loud” music—to show that incidents of racist listening cannot be dismissed, laughed off, or chalked up to white ignorance and/or innocence. I sought to provide useful language to think and talk about listening and the agency inherent within it, amplifying the work performed toward decolonizing listening by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the Jubilee Singers, Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, Huddie Ledbetter, Lena Horne, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ann Petry, and so many others, so that we may liberate ourselves and our society from the continuing racial hierarchies and material inequities structured by the sonic color line and the listening ear. Americans come of age within a racialized soundscape that enables segregation and racism through sonic cues that vibrate under the radar of visually based discrimination laws and affects. In the allegedly color-blind post–Civil Rights Movement United States, there are “invisible, flashing white-only signs everywhere,”1 and we hear them loud and clear—paradoxically when we seem the most not to.

Sounds have histories, and how we hear and understand them can, without exaggeration, mean life or death. Scholar Regina Bradley describes the painful burden of self-policing and the way it travels with her: “As a loud, squeaky black woman I am especially attuned to how my sonic footprint plays into how I live and if I should die. As a black woman, the bulk of my threat is associated with my loudness. My blackness sonically and culturally codes me as threatening due to the volume of my voice.”2 When asked to connect my historical work with our contemporary struggles, I often define the sonic color line like this: when you know that in order for you to stay alive, “to listen” must become “to obey,” no matter what; when you know your irritated tone of voice at a traffic ticket stop might mean your death, as happened to Sandra Bland in Texas; when the police hear “OK OK OK” as aggression, and it costs you your life like it did Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It is when you are a 19-year-old girl (Rachel Jeantel, Sanford, Florida) testifying about the loss of your good friend—Trayvon Martin, shot to death by neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman—a death you heard through Martin’s cell phone, but you cannot get through a sentence of testimony without being tone-policed, told to repeat yourself, reprimanded to speak louder, and essentially asked to serve as your own translator for a predominately white jury. When witnesses do not—or cannot—aurally conform to the sonic color line—Bradley describes Jeantel’s resistant performance as “sonic rachetness”3—the stakes are high; they risk being silenced by lawyers, reprimanded by judges, misinterpreted by court reporters, and tuned out by predominately white middle-class jurors. The sonic color-line almost certainly contributes to a penal system where black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men.4

The listening ear also creates situations compelling people of color to police themselves in order to gain entry to white spaces and, all too often, to make it out healthy, whole, and alive. Until November 2013, for example, Dillinger’s Celtic Pub and Eatery in Binghamton, New York, posted signs that the bar “officially” did “not speak ‘Yo’ or ‘Bro.’ ”5 Most immediately, this communicated to speakers of African American Vernacular English that white ways of listening, being, and speaking—culturally coded as “proper”—controlled this space. By evoking the racialized hierarchy of speech sounds, the sign created a hostile space for black patrons, one where the doorman might arbitrarily deny you entry, slam you to the ground, and call you “nigger,” as happened to Kyle Lovett-Pitts on August 25, 2013.6

Perhaps most insidiously, Bradley’s and Lovett-Pitts’s experiences tell us, the sonic color line fractures Americans’ simultaneous experiences of the same spaces. It enables segregation via sonic protocol as we live, work, study, and raise children side by side in fractured, unequal spaces that seem ostensibly—and legally—“free,” “open,” and “equitable” for everyone. And the sonic color-line impacts our campuses just as it does our streets. On February 25, 2015, the Binghamton University group Students for Change went to a town hall meeting about racial injustice on campus. There, they were met with armed police.7 Though the university later claimed the officers were at the meeting only to listen, that the police chose—and were permitted—to listen bearing visible firearms during a time of nationwide #blacklivesmatter protests over police brutality spoke silent volumes about whose safety—whose lives—mattered in that moment. That row of uniformed white men with guns and Kevlar vests charged the allegedly neutral space of a public university with racialized affect before a word was said, bifurcating the room into “the threatening” and “the threatened” and silently blaming the students for the very hostility and lack of safety they were there to protest.

However, it is my fondest wish that the historical examples of black agency and decolonizing practices in the face of racism through soundscape control remind us that the listening ear’s limited range creates the conditions for its own undoing. As I write, university students all over the country—Binghamton, University of Mississippi, Ithaca College, Yale, Tufts, Princeton, Brown, Claremont McKenna—are challenging the institutional racism of American higher education and their respective institutions’ wholesale refusal to do anything about it (while lauding “diversity”). And while we do not yet know where the nascent #blacklivesmatter movement will be in five or ten years—or even next year—it is important to note that these students, in unity with protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, Staten Island, New York, Baltimore, Maryland, and many other U.S. cities, are sounding the most recent crisis erupting from a long-standing form of sonic white supremacy. Some protests have mobilized silent die-ins, while others have wielded a wide spectrum of sound—bullhorn call-and-response chants, shouts, screams, YouTube videos, well-timed questions—to demand new relations of speaking and listening, particularly the right to listen freely to themselves and as themselves.

As Rachel Jeantel told Zimmerman defense attorney Don West, “That’s how I speak, you cannot hear me that well.”8

As the span of this book shows, the sonic color line and the listening ear accreted over time and have continued to evolve, with sometimes-frightening efficacy, in tandem with technology and racial ideologies. The difficult, necessary work of decolonizing listening and dismantling race’s sonic architecture will take much time, awareness, discomfort, and steady, conscious, meticulous effort. In the long tradition of the trope of the listener, may we challenge, multiply, and amplify our listening, in order that we, paraphrasing Ice Cube, check ourselves before we wreck ourselves. May we also offer one another something more and something better: an ethics of listening where we are all, at long last, as Frederick Douglass imagined, “witnesses and participants,” hearing beyond the narrowed lives racialized listening has wrought, and amplifying the community listening that sustained Harriet Jacobs, listening out to and for one another.