“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor
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In summer 2021, sound artist, engineer, musician, and educator Johann Diedrick convened a panel at the intersection of racial bias, listening, and AI technology at Pioneerworks in Brooklyn, NY. Diedrick, 2021 Mozilla Creative Media award recipient and creator of such works as Dark Matters, is currently working on identifying the origins of racial bias in voice interface systems. Dark Matters, according to Squeaky Wheel, “exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling, sound, and storytelling, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word, and how AI systems underserve Black communities.” And now, he’s working with SO! as guest editor for this series for Sounding Out! (along with ed-in-chief JS!). It kicked off with Amina Abbas-Nazarii’s post, helping us to understand how Speech AI systems operate from a very limiting set of assumptions about the human voice. Today Golden Owens explored what happens when companies sell Black voices along with their Intelligent Virtual Assistants. Tune in for a deep historical dive into the racialized sound of servitude in America. Even though corporations ain’t trying to hear this absolutely critical information, they better listen up. –JS
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In October 2019, Google released an ad for their Google Assistant (GA), an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) that initially debuted in 2016. As revealed by onscreen text and the video’s caption, the ad’s announced that the GA would soon have a new celebrity voice. The ten-second promotion includes a soundbite from this unseen celebrity—who states: “You can still call me your Google Assistant. Now I just sound extra fly”— followed by audio of the speaker’s laughter, a white screen, the GA logo, and a written question: “Can you guess who it is?”
Consumers quickly speculated about the person behind the voice, with many posting their guesses on Reddit. The earliest comments named Tiffany Haddish, Lizzo, and Issa Rae as prospects, with other users affirming these guesses. These women were considered the most popular contenders: two articles written about the new GA voice cited the Reddit post, with one calling these women Redditors’ most popular guesses and the other naming only them as users’ desired choices. Those who guessed Rae were proven correct. One day after the ad, Google released a longer promo revealing her as the GA’s new voice, including footage of Rae recording responses for the assistant. The ad ends with Rae repeating the “extra fly” line from the initial promo, smiling into the camera.
Google’s addition of Rae as an IVA voice option is one of several recent examples of Black people’s voices employed in this manner. Importantly, this trend toward Black-voiced IVAs deviates from the pre-established standard of these digital aides. While there are many voice options available, the default voices for IVAs are white female voices with flat dialects. This shift toward Black American voices is notable not only because of conversations about inclusion—with some Black users saying they feel more represented by these new voices—but because this influx of Black voices marks a spiritual return to the historical employment of Black people as service-providing, labor-performing entities in the United States, thus subliminally reinforcing historical biases about Black people as uniquely suited for performing this type of work.
Marketed as labor-saving devices, IVAs are programmed to assist with cooking and grocery shopping, transmit messages and reminders, and provide entertainment, among other tasks. Since the late 2010s they have also been able to operate other technologies within users’ homes: Alexa, for example, can control Roomba robotic vacuums; IVA-compatible smart plugs or smart home devices enable IVAs to control lights, locks, thermostats, and other such apparatuses. Behaviorally, IVAs are designed and expected to be on-call at all times, but not to speak or act out of turn—with programmers often directed to ensure these aides are relatable, reliable, trustworthy, and unobtrusive.
Far from operating in a vacuum, IVAs eerily evoke the presence of and parameters set for enslaved workers and domestic servants in the U.S.—many of whom have historically been Black American women. Like IVAs, Black women servants cooked, cleaned, entertained children, and otherwise served their (predominantly white) employers, themselves operating as labor-saving devices through their performance of these labors. Employers similarly expected these women to be ever-available, occupy specific areas of the home, and obey all requests and demands—and were unsettled if not infuriated when maids did not behave according to their expectations.
White women being the default voices of IVAs has somewhat obfuscated the degree to which these aides have re-embodied and replaced the Black servants who once predominantly executed this work, but incorporating Black voices into these roles removes this veil, symbolically re-implementing Black people as labor-performing entities by having them operate as the virtual assistants who now perform much of the labor Black workers historically performed. Enabling Black people to be used as IVAs thus re-aligns Black beings with the performance of service and labor.
While Black women were far from the only demographic conscripted into domestic labor, by the 1920s they comprised a “permanent pool of servants” throughout the country, due largely to the egress of white American and immigrant women from domestic service into fields that excluded Black women (183). Black women’s prominence in domestic service was heavily reflected in early U.S. media, which overwhelmingly portrayed domestic servants not just as Black women, but as Black Mammies—domestic servant archetypes originally created to promote the myth that Black women “were contented, even happy as slaves.” Characters like Gone with the Wind’s “Mammy” pulled both from then-current associations of Black women with domestic labor and from white nostalgia for the Antebellum era, and specifically for the archetypal Mammy—marking Black women as idealized labor-performing domestics operating in service of white employers. These on-screen servants were “always around when the boss needed them…[and] always ready to lend a helping hand when times were tough” (36). Historian Donald Bogle dubbed this era of Hollywood the “Age of the Negro Servant,” referenced in this reel from the New York Times.
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Cinema and television merely built from years of audible racism on the radio—America’s most prominent form of in-home entertainment in the first half of the 20th century—where Black actors also played largely servant and maid roles that demanded they speak in “distorted dialect, exaggerated intonation, rhythmic speech cadences, and particular musical instruments” in order to appear at all (143). This white-contrived portrayal of Black people is known as “Blackvoice,” and essentially functions as “the minstrel show boiled down to pure aurality” (14). These performances allowed familiar ideals of and narratives about Blackness to be communicated and recirculated on a national scale, even without the presence of Black bodies. Labor-performing Black characters like Beulah, Molasses and January, Aunt Jemima, and Amos and Andy were prominent in the Golden Age of Radio, all initially voiced by white actors. In fact, Aunt Jemima’s print advertising was just as dependent on stereotypical representations of her voice as it was on visual “Mammy” imagery.
When Black actors broke through white exclusion on the airwaves, many took over roles once voiced by white men and/or were forced by white radio producers and scriptwriters to “‘talk as white people believed Negroes talked’” so that white audiences could discern them as Black (371). This continuous realignment undoubtedly informs contemporary ideas of labor, labor performance, and laboring bodies, further promoted by the sudden influx of Black voice assistants in 2019.
Specifically, these similarities demonstrate that contemporary IVAs are intrinsically haunted by Black women slaves and servants: built in accordance with and thus inevitably evoking these laborers in their positioning, programming, and task performance. Further facilitating this alignment is the fact that advertisements for Black-voiced IVAs purposefully link well-known Black bodies in conjunction with their Black voices. Excepting Apple’s Black-sounding voice options for Siri, all of the Black IVA voice options since 2019 have belonged to prominent Black American celebrities. Prior to Issa Rae, GA users could employ John Legend as their digital aide (April 2019 until March 2020). Samuel L. Jackson became the first celebrity voice option for Amazon’s Alexa in December 2019, followed by Shaquille O’Neal in July 2021.
The ads for Black-voiced IVAs thus link these disembodied aides not just to Black bodies, but to specific Black bodies as a sales tactic—bodies which signify particular images and embodiments of Blackness. The Samuel L. Jackson Alexa ad utilizes close-ups of Jackson recording lines for the IVA and of Echo speakers with Jackson’s voice emitting from them in response to users. John Legend is physically absent from the ad announcing him as the GA; however, his celebrity wife directs the GA to sing for her instead, after which she states that it is “just like the real John”—thus linking Legend’s body to the GA even without his onscreen presence. Amazon has even explicitly explored the connection between the Black-voiced IVA and the Black body, releasing a 2021 commercial called “Alexa’s Body” that saw Alexa voiced and physically embodied by Michael B. Jordan—with the main character in the commercial insinuating that he is the ideal vessel for Alexa.
By aligning these bodies with, and having them act as, labor-performing devices in service of consumers, these advertisements both re-align Blackness with labor and illuminate how these devices were always already haunted by laboring Black bodies—and especially, given the demographics of the bodies who most performed the types of labors IVAs now execute, laboring Black women’s bodies. That the majority of the Black celebrities employed as Black IVA voices are men suggests some awareness of and attempt to distance from this history and implicit haunting—an effort which itself exposes and illuminates the degree to which this haunting exists.
In some cases, the Black people lending their voices to these IVAs also speak in a way that sonically suggests Blackness: Issa Rae’s “Now I’m just extra fly,” for example, incorporates Black American slang through the use of the word “fly. As part of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the term “fly” dates back to the 1970s and denotes coolness, attractiveness, and fashionableness. Because of its inclusion in Hip Hop, which has become the dominant music genre in the United States, the term, its meaning, and its racial origins are widely known amongst consumers. By using the word “fly,” Rae nods not only at these qualities but also at her own Blackness in a manner that is recognizable to a mainstream American audience. Due in part to Hip Hop’s popularity, U.S.-based media outlets, corporations, and individuals of varying races and ethnicities regularly appropriate AAVE and Black slang terms, often without regard for the culture that created them or the vernacular they stem from. The ad preceding Issa Rae’s revelation as the GA specifically invited users to align the voice with a celebrity body, and users’ predominant claims that the voice was a Black woman’s suggest that something about the voice conjured Blackness and the Black female body.
This racial marking was also likely facilitated by how people naturally listen and respond to voices. As Nina Sun Eidsheim notes in The Race of Sound, “voices heard are ultimately identified, recognized, and named by listeners at large. In hearing a voice, one also brings forth a series of assumptions about the nature of voice” (12). This series of assumptions, Eidsheim asserts in “The Voice as Action,” is inflected by the “multisensory context” surrounding a given voice, i.e., “a composite of visual, textural, discursive, and other kinds of information” (9). While we imagine our impressions of voices as uniquely meaningful, “we cannot but perceive [them] through filters generated by our own preconceptions” (10). As a result, listening is never a neutral or truly objective practice.
For many consumers, these filters are informed by what Jennifer Lynn Stoever terms the sonic color line, “a socially constructed boundary that racially codes sonic phenomena such as vocal timbre, accents, and musical tones” (11). Where the racial color line allows white people to separate themselves from Black people on the basis of visual and behavioral differences, the sonic color line allows people “to construct and discern racial identities based on voices, sounds, and particular soundscapes” and to assign nonwhite voices with “differential cultural, social, and political value” (11). In the U.S., the sonic color line operates in tandem with the American listening ear, which “normalizes the aural tastes and standards of white elite masculinity as the singular way to interpret sonic information” (13) and therefore marks-as-Other not only the voices and bodies of Black people, but also those of non-males and the non-elite.
Ironically, the very listening practices which make consumers register particular voices and vocal qualities as Black also make Black voices inaccessible to Alexa and other IVAs. Scholarship on Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems and Speech AI observes that many Black users find it necessary to code-switch when speaking to IVAs, as the devices fail to comprehend their linguistic specificities. A study by Christina N. Harrington et al. in which Black elders used the Google Home to seek health information discovered that “participants felt that Google Home struggles to understand their communication style (e.g., diction or accent) and language (e.g., dialect) specifically due to the device being based on Standard English” (15). To address these struggles, participants switched to Standard American English (SAE), eliminating informal contractions and changing their tone and verbiage so that the GA would understand them. As one of the study’s participants states,
You do have to change your words. Yes. You do have to change your diction and yes, you have to use… It cannot be an exotic name or a name that’s out of the Caucasian round. …You have to be very clear with the English language. No ebonic (15).
This incomprehension extends to Black Americans of all ages, and to other IVAs. A study by Allison Koenecke et al. on ASR systems produced by Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Apple discovered that these entities had a harder time accurately transcribing Black speech than white speech, producing “an average word error rate (WER) of 0.35 for black speakers compared with 0.19 for white speakers.” (7684). A study by Zion Mengesha et al. on the impact of these errors on Black Americans—which included participants from different regions with a range of ages, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds and education-levels—discovered that many felt frustrated and othered by these mistakes, and felt further pressure to code-switch so that they would not be misunderstood. Koenecke et al. concluded that ASR systems could not understand the “phonological, phonetic, or prosodic characteristics of” AAVE (7687), and that this ignorance would make the use of these technologies more difficult for Black users—a sentiment that was echoed by participants in the study conducted by Mengesha et al., most of whom marked the technology as working better for white and/or SAE speakers (5).
The speech recognition errors these technologies demonstrate—which also extend to speakers in other racial and ethnic groups—illuminate the reality that despite including Black voices as IVAs, these assistant technologies are not truly built for Black people, or for any person that does not speak Standard American English. And where AAVE is largely associated with Blackness, SAE is predominantly associated with whiteness: as a dialect widely perceived to be “lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics,” it is recognized as being “spoken by the majority group or the socially advantaged group” in the United States—both groups which are solely or primarily composed of white people. SAE is so identified with whiteness that Black people who only speak Standard English are often told that they sound and/or “talk” white, and Black people who deliberately invoke SAE in professional and/or interracial settings (i.e., code switching) are described as “talking white” or using their “white voice” when doing so. That IVAs and other ASR systems have such trouble understanding AAVE and other non-standard English dialects suggests that these technologies were not designed to understand any dialect other than SAE—and thus, given SAE’s strong identification with whiteness, were designed specifically to assist, understand, and speak to white users.
Writing on this phenomena as a woman with a non-standard accent, Sinduja Rangarajan highlights in “Hey Siri—Why Don’t You Understand More People Like Me?” that none of the IVAs currently on the market offer any American dialect that is not SAE. And while users can change their IVA’s accents, they are limited to Standard American, British, Irish, Australian, Indian, and South African—which Rangarajan rightly highlights as revealing who the IVAs think they are talking to, rather than who their user actually is. That most of these accents belong to Western, predominantly white countries (or to countries once colonized by white imperialists) strongly suggests that these devices are programmed to speak to—and perform labor for—white consumers specifically.
When considering the primary imagined and target users of IVAs, the sudden influx of Black-voiced IVAs becomes particularly insidious. Though they may indeed make some Black users feel more represented, cultivating this representation is merely a byproduct of their actual purpose. Because these technologies are not built for Black consumers, Black-voiced IVAs are meant to appeal not to Black users, but to white ones. Rae, Jackson, and the other Black celebrity voices may provide a much-needed variety in the types of voices applied to IVAs, but they primarily operate as “further examples of technology companies using Black voices to entertain white consumers while ignoring Black consumers.” Black-voiced assistants, after all, no better understand Black vernacular English than any of the other voice options for IVAs, a reality marking Black speech patterns as enjoyable but not legitimate.
By excluding Black consumers, the companies behind these IVAs insinuate that Blackness is only acceptable and worthy of consideration when operating in service of whiteness. Where Black people as consumers have been delegitimized and disregarded, Black voices as labor-saving assistants have been welcomed and deemed profitable—a reality which further emphasizes how historical constructions of Black people as labor-performing devices haunts these contemporary technologies. Tech companies reinforce historical positionings of white people as ideal consumers and Black people as consumable products—repeating historical demarcations of Blackness and whiteness in the present.
In imagining the futures of IVAs, the companies behind them would need to reconsider how they interact—or fail to interact—with Black users. Both Samuel L. Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal, the last of the Black-celebrity-voiced IVAs still currently available to users, will be removed as Alexa voice options by September 2023, presenting an opportunity for these companies to divest. Whether or not the brands behind these IVAs take this initiative, consumers themselves can be critical of how AI technologies continue to reestablish hierarchical systems, of their own interactions with these devices, and of who these technologies are truly made for. In being critical, we can perhaps begin to envision alternative, reparative modes of AI technology—modes that serve and support more than one kind of user.
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Featured Image: Issa Rae gif from the 2017 Golden Globes
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Golden Marie Owens is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. Her research interests include representations of race and gender in American media and popular culture, artificial intelligence, and racialized sounds. Her doctoral dissertation, “Mechanical Maids: Digital Assistants, Domestic Spaces, and the Spectre(s) of Black Women’s
Labor,” examines how intelligent virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa evoke and are haunted by Black women slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States. In her time at Northwestern, she has had internal fellowships through the Office of Fellowships and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She currently holds an MMUF Dissertation Grant through the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and Ford Dissertation Fellowship through the National Academy for Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari
Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso
Mr. and Mrs. Talking Machine: The Euphonia, the Phonograph, and the Gendering of Nineteenth Century Mechanical Speech – J. Martin Vest
Echo and the Chorus of Female Machines—AO Roberts
Black Excellence on the Airwaves: Nora Holt and the American Negro Artist Program —Chelsea Daniel and Samantha Ege
Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States–Vanessa Valdes
On Whiteness and Sound Studies–Gus Stadler
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Tuning In to the Desi Valley: Getting to Know a Community via Radio
Sound has a peculiar relationship to mindfulness; zoning in and out, active and passive forms of listening while we situate our listening practices alongside other daily activities. Especially when it comes to driving, listening to something or someone or just singing aloud by myself, I have realized, helps me drown out other noises of alertness. Over the years I have come to value background music or chatter and especially radio programming that takes the burden of curation and scheduling off my back, in all sorts of tasks that require deep concentration. Enough and more has been said about the visual-bias in various forms of ethnographic inquiry (see Andrew C. Sparkes’s “Ethnography and the senses” for a good example). Without belaboring these arguments, I also find that knowing through listening and listening as a mode of non-haptic yet immersive and intimate engagement can also prove to be a fruitful method of inquiry, especially in our post-pandemic worlds, where it feels a lot harder to establish intimacy. The United Nations noted that radio, in particular, “provided solace” during that period of physical distancing and social isolation.
For me, radio sparked my accidental realization and foregrounding of sonic methods as an itinerant means of getting to know new things, people and surroundings in life and research when I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-2022 to start a new position as a postdoctoral researcher. Knowing that I would continue living in California for the near future, after eight long years of having deferred driving in America, I decided to learn driving and buy a car. I was also especially excited to be moving to Sunnyvale, a city in the Southern Peninsula, located between more known places like Palo Alto and San Jose. Sunnyvale is often jokingly called the desi capital, perhaps the most Indian of any ‘Little India’ you could find in America. As shorthand, desi, a Hindi word,refers to anyone and everything with ties to the South Asian subcontinent. In more recent years, the term has gained currency especially among South Asian diasporic communities to self-refer to culture, music, food, often to signify the presence and strength of transnational ties (between India and their countries of settlement).
What I hadn’t anticipated was that driving brought about a new connection to the medium of radio, as I started tuning in to take my mind off the jitters that come with the new sounds of an automobile-dependent region: fast moving rubber hitting the freeway tarmac and the lane changes and the scalar adjustments that demand driving tens of miles to ensure you still have a social life stitched together across the vastness of California. I began to find the act of tuning in and out of stations fascinating, especially how the radio as a device holds the parallel realities of so many people with different interests, languages and politics together but separate. Scholarship and even casual listening shows that non-English radio stations catering to various immigrant and other communities have existed for a long time in the US and elsewhere (I wish pondering the sonic geographies of Radio Garden, a web-based map interface that allows listeners to access any free-to-air radio stations across the world, wasn’t beyond the scope of this post!). Both as an ethnographer and as an insider-outsider within the larger Indian immigrant and diaspora community (but a newcomer to the Bay Area), tuning into the local desi radio station while driving offered me a good way to enter the desi community of the Bay Area, to know what it means to be desi and perform Indianness in 2022, in a place where I regularly see so many Indians and South Asians every single day.
As a friend who recently visited me in Sunnyvale remarked as we waited for our table at the always-busy Madras Cafe, Sunnyvale feels so much like India! And I felt it too; what she was referring to was not only the very visible presence of Indian people all around town or the abundance of restaurants catering to various sub-regional cuisines from India. What felt different to me here was how relaxed everyone looked in grocery stores, restaurants and elsewhere, how utterly remade Sunnyvale is as a pan-Asian but mostly Indian space that even the smallest performances of fitting in feel unnecessary. In fact, shopping her reminded me of a point Purnima Mankekar’s Indian narrators made in her iconic essay on Indian grocery shopping in the San Francisco Bay Area (2010), that Indian stores in Sunnyvale and Milpitas as places where “white people look out of place” as compared to the ones in Berkeley.
The juxtaposition of the non-performances and the weight of being comfortably in place in a community like Sunnyvale only settles on the mind and body very slowly, like a faint but familiar smell from home. Words and demands often stumble out of my mouth at the grocery store, as if I am allowed and I will be completely understood. Immigrant life in America is steeped in language acrobatics, balancing being understood with becoming deliberately opaquely incomprehensible, using one accent for the ones from home, one for those who make you feel at home, and then the American accent for the Americans outside. The contrast of places like Sunnyvale, Fremont, Milpitas and other similar Northern California cities that have been transformed by immigrant presence is not just one of tangible and observable things, but sonic markers too, like Bolly 92.3FM.
Bolly 92.3FM is the default desiradio station that services the entire San Francisco Bay Area. As the name suggests, for the most part the station plays popular Bollywood songs from recently released movies and albums, but just as other stations do in India, Bolly92.3FM leverages its listener demographics at different times of the day to also play classics and hits from older Hindi films during late night slots. Interestingly, as the presenters repeat the station name and jingle time and again, they also remind you that you are listening to Bay Area’s Bollywood station owned by the Silicon Valley Asian media network. The name Bolly92.3FM is a play on the broad familiarity with Bollywood in the US even as Indian audiences globally have moved away from the older connotations of Bollywood as North Indian cinema with song, dance and people dressed in flashy clothes. Much like the hyper-authentic Indian restaurants that serve regional cuisines such as Andhra, Tamil, Gujarati, Rajasthani and Marathi food to their loyal and affording immigrant patrons, Bolly92.3FM has also configured its programming to cater to different regional and linguistic communities from India in the Bay Area. For instance, Saturday morning and afternoon slots are dedicated to Telugu programs—everything is in Telugu (language) from the hosts discussions to the songs being played as well as the actual topics being discussed—as if the station turns into a different station with the implicit acknowledgement of the substantial cultural presence and possibly the sonic and financial power of Telugu listeners among the wider Indian community here. There are similar slots dedicated to Gujarati language programming.
In addition to language and topical interests, listening to Bolly92.3FM has been instructive in getting a feel for communal desires, aspirations and anxieties through its advertisement. There are fellow desi real estate agents, tax planners, dentists, travel agencies and coaching centers, each signaling to why they are trustworthy. Some remind their audiences of their shared cultural background as key to them being able to understand their customers’ needs, others also indicate their familiarity with America: one realtor is the only Indian-origin person to feature in a top realtor list, another tax planner’s family has been in the US for three generations and thus he is well aware of the nitty-gritties of transnational estate planning. A known Indian-origin realtor in the area even sponsors his own radio show on the weekends where he takes questions from prospective home buyers and sellers. Before and beyond giving them financial advice, he often explains how fellow Indian immigrants think about financial opportunities, investments, how they might seek social validation from fellow Indians who might see their home and so on. He weaves in such exposition before talking dry financial facts about mortgages. The same tax planner and his co-host occasionally offer historical accounts of changing real estate trends, how certain places used to be affordable for Indian immigrant buyers and how new places are becoming of interest as vacation homes for more affluent Indian immigrants.
Hearing the tax planners and real estate agents plot these dynamic and speculative maps of South Asian financial, cultural and political futures week-after-week felt like witnessing what many historical texts on migration within the Bay Area have described as waves in the past. As I mentioned earlier, Sunnyvale is not the only ‘Little India’ in the Bay Area, let alone in California, but rather, is a more recent iconic place in the Indian and South Asian diaspora map where the younger and newer immigrants are finding homes. Fremont, Milpitas, and Hayward in the East Bay closer to Oakland, and San Jose in the South Bay, saw similar waves of Indian immigrant settlements in the past, many of whom now far more affluent than their younger counterparts. In my short time since moving here, I learned both from conversations with friends who grew up in the area as well as from communication scholar Anne Marie Todd’s work on the past and present of Santa Clara Valley, this region has not only seen waves of migration from settlers across the world but with each incoming wave and turn in occupational trends from farming to railroads to IT work. Multiple communities have remade cities in the Bay Area over the decades.
I also find advertisements as well as talk shows interesting because they offer a more proximate and concentrated triangulation of otherwise scattered, overheard communal talk – I’ve heard things about Indian immigrants and real estate, their aspirations for their children to get into Ivy league colleges. I have also been asked at the grocery store if I know people looking to get married; I’ve overheard aunties at the grocery store consulting each other about dealing with death, financial loss, planetary alignments and more. But it is through the radio that these private interests, anxieties and futures take more collective and articulate forms.
To speak, to be heard, and to be understood as intended are as important as visual representation to allow for feeling in place in the world and for feeling at home in the United States. Very simply put, in the American context, while Black and Brown vocal expression and volume or the stereotype of loudness have been historically stigmatized as a part of the larger racist depiction of ‘unruly’ bodies, various forms of Asian speech, languages and expression including loudness but also silence and the absence of vocality, have also been racialized against the backdrop of white socio-linguistic normativity. Specifically, Indian and South Asian immigrants have been repeatedly represented in popular American culture as muted characters whose interiority is either irrelevant to the plot or cannot be accessed. Think of Raj Koothrappali from the show The Big Bang Theory, an accomplished scientist at the prestigious Caltech university who loses his voice around women. In accounts of Indian tech workers in the US from the Y2K era, one finds multiple articles casting them as the back-office worker – good at laborious and boring work but not presentation material. Some of these stereotypes have changed and splintered as more South Asians technologists have gone on to become successful executives and leaders in US companies, but vocality as a form of publicity can be crucial to sonic forms of belonging.
When I arrived in the Bay Area, I was still trying to figure out how to form a community and how to immerse myself in the desi community here, somewhat selfishly to get a glimpse of how Indian presence is remaking the Valley, not only through IT work but also through cultural and political performances. But I also wanted to get to know people, be known by people around. Olakhita means “people known to us” in Gujarati, my mother tongue; in Hindi jaan-pehchaan means to be in each other’s knowing that gives you some claim and affiliation over others without deep intimacy, not quite acquaintances or neighbors like in the American context. Apart from the numerous Whatsapp and Facebook groups aimed at desifolks living in the same neighborhood or city, Bolly92.3FM acts as a beacon for Indians and South Asians spread across San Francisco, the East Bay and the South Bay areas, offering a medium for the various Indian associations and event organizers to reach out to thousands and invite them to Diwali, Dussehra and other festival celebrations as well as any major concerts by visiting Indian artists in the area.
This is the far from the first or only time that a radio station has facilitated the forging of affective ties and social and material connections in diaspora. Rather this post recounts how active and passive listening to and through the station revealed over time how much South Asian presence has transformed the Bay Area. I attended the massive Diwali and Dussehra events advertised on 92.3, and once there, I could recognize so many of the organizers and sponsors’ names – some of them were the same tax planners and realtors that also run ads and sponsored segments on the station. One week in late September, an ad played on the radio, announcing that a famous hotel in downtown San Jose was now able to accommodate more than a thousand guests and offer a special entryway for the baraat procession (when the groom’s party of a few hundred comes dancing up to the wedding venue). The ad ended with the contact details of a South Asian representative of the hotel who could handle all queries related to Indian wedding arrangements! Bolly92.3FM mediates and shapes the collective desi identity through its programming and advertising, in turn also stitching, materializing and rendering visible a map of the Indian community spread across dozens of non-contiguous cities and neighborhoods in the Bay Area.
It bears noting, however, that the idea of Indianness or desi-ness (an imagined brotherhood among all the expats here) advanced through the radio programs, advertisements as well as the cultural celebrations, is very much a nationalistic and Hindu-dominant one. Although India is an ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse country and not all people of Indian origin in the Bay Area are Hindu, the radio announcers never really celebrate or discuss Eid, Christmas, or Thanksgiving as events of possible interest. Just based on what is said and what is left unsaid, the dominant self-imagination of the Bay Area desi community as advanced through the radio station feels like it quietly aligns with the dominant religious and political imagination of India as Hindu, middle-class, post-religious and post-caste.
In the process of seeing this map render in my own imagination through regular listening, I also realized how this form of distant listening replicated the mode of jaan-pehchan (getting to know) for the itinerant immigrant-ethnographer. There is always the pre-fieldwork moment, the slightly promiscuous exploratory moment of getting to know and immersing oneself before one can articulate stakes and research questions. It is also often a period of deep uncertainty and ambivalence, since, as ethnographers, responsibility for and towards our field, communities, and interlocutors is always at the center of every project. We are always reminded not to be extractive and to think deeply about power relations even as we attempt to forge meaningful ties with those whom we want to observe and learn from and write about. Much like other visa-workers and international scholars in US academia, being a non-citizen ethnographer engenders multiple kinds of precarities—there is no straightforward or replicable guidebook on how to establish rapport, gain access, build trust and more with a community. More importantly, the itinerant-immigrant ethnographer’s relationships are also always interrupted, prone to arbitrary border restrictions and chronic deracination.
In the early days of digital ethnography, Kate Crawford powerfully argued to reframe acts of lurking (silently and passively hanging out in online communities) as forms of listening and by extension, listening as a concomitant and constitutive practice when we consider participation as speaking or having a voice. In the case of diasporic radio, as I realized, not only is the act of listening quite literal but it also affords and reinforces the vitality of different modes of agentic power and participation, those marked by ambivalence, yet-to-be gained legitimacy; forms of minor participation if you will. Via Crawford, listening and/as lurking also emerges as specifically racially inflected modes of agentic participation against the backdrop of media policy and the emphasis on free expression and speech as the ultimate realization of democratic power.
Among diasporic communities and further among itinerant immigrants within those communities, listening, overhearing and eavesdropping become the de facto modes of democratic and communitarian participation. Listening to the radio as a way of immersion is not a solution to these enduring dilemmas of ethical ethnography but to borrow from the analogy of Californian driving, listening to the radio, just like other forms of digital and analog lurking, allowed me an ‘on-ramp’ to gradually merge and embed myself in the larger South Asian diasporic community.
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Featured Image: “Driving” by Flickr User AnnaNakami (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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Noopur Raval is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in understanding global futures of work, the life and work decisions made by immigrant workers in tech companies, changing values and moral norms and projects of personhood especially in postcolonial settings. Noopur received a PhD in Informatics from University of California Irvine (UCI) in September 2020 and, through July 2022 was a postdoc researcher at the AI Now Institute at New York University. Noopur is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz – Silicon Valley Extension in the Computational Media department, working with Dr Norman Su. In Fall 2023, Noopur will join the Department of Information Studies at UCLA as an assistant professor.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Gendered Soundscapes of India, an Introduction“–Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath
The Queer Sound of the Dandiya Queen, Falguni Pathak–-Pavitra Sundar
“Out of Sync: Gendered Location Sound Work in Bollywood“—Priya Jaikumar
SO! LA: Sounding the California Story–Bridget Hoida
“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn–David Goren
Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-language Radio–Dolores Inés Casillas
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