President Obama: All Over But the Shouting?
Ishmael Reed’s 12/12/2010 op-ed for the New York Times, “What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama,” certainly struck a nerve amongst the Left. In the piece, Reed calls out far-Lefters for their misplaced–and dangerous–desire for President Obama to essentially “bust a can of whup ass” out on the Republicans over the tax cut debacle. Citing a lifetime of being labeled rhetorically “rowdy” by white teachers and peers, Reed calls attention to a deeply embedded and racialized double standard for the public expression of anger in the United States. Beyond turning a deaf ear their own pleas for a “sane” national debate back in October–see Mark Brantner‘s Sounding Out! analysis of the rhetorical logic of John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity here–Reed argues that white liberals are also disregarding the racialized difference between white perceptions of their own anger (represented as righteous and authoritative) and their characterizarions of black anger (as a loud, dangerous “whup ass”–or as Reed phrases it “paranoid,” “bitter,” “rowdy,” “angry,” [and] “bull[ying]”). In other words, behind the cries in Reed’s comments for Obama to regain his “drama and passion” and to “stand up and tell these idiots to stuff it” lies a flirtation with and fear of “black anger,” which has a long history in the United States. As Reed mentions, black intellectuals have “been accused of tirades and diatribes for more than 100 years.”
As someone who researches the racialization of sound and listening, I have been tracking Obama’s struggle with sonic stereotypes for quite some time now, and I think it is important to connect Reed’s recent thoughts with the utterance of another man named Reid almost a year ago. Woven into comments supposedly intended as praise of President Obama’s political prowess, Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) told two political journalists that he had known Obama would be elected president in 2008 because he was “light skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” In this brief sound bite, the other Reid acknowledged the increased role that vocal grain and diction would play in a “post-racial” or “colorblind” world, linking the racialization of skin pigmentation with its less acknowledged yet perhaps more insidious counterpart, the racialization of sounds, voices and speech. Unfortunately, incendiary media coverage focused bluntly on Reid’s alleged racism for using the antiquated term “Negro” rather than sparking a more nuanced conversation about the role that race plays in perception and the multifaceted ways in which this racialized perception affects American politics and culture, down to the very level of the senses.
What was most disturbing about Reid’s comments (and the least talked about) was how they showed aural markers of race aligning with—and even superseding—visual codes of race, exposing the seeming comfort Americans have developed with this “sonic color-line,” as I have termed it. Inspired by and indebted to W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of the visual color-line in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his later reimagining of that color-line as a suffocating plate-glass enclosure in Dusk of Dawn (1940), my notion of the sonic color-line posits listening as an interpretive site where racial difference is coded, produced, and policed. In short, we hear race in addition to (and sometimes even before) seeing it. As I have argued elsewhere, the socially constructed division between “sound/noise” marks one border of the sonic color-line; the hierarchies pointed out by Reed (quiet/loud) and exacerbated by Reid (proper/improper) mark still others. The sonic markers of whiteness (“sound”/”quiet”/”proper”) are culturally associated with both intellect and full citizenship privileges; the sonic markers representing blackness (“noise”/”loud”/”improper”) are repeatedly trotted out as signs of deviance, danger, and deserved abjection.
Though I very rarely find myself agreeing with Conservative linguist John McWhorter, I couldn’t help concede to the sentiment expressed in his January 9, 2010, blog for the The New Republic, “Reid’s Three Little Words; The Log in Our Own Eye”: “And who among us—including black people—thinks someone with what I call a ‘black-cent’ who occasionally popped up with double negatives and things like aks could be elected President, whether it’s fair or not?” Both Reid’s statement and McWhorter’s embellishment imply an unspoken sonic color-line, a racial “common sense” that African Americans are not only identifiable by a particular type of sound—the so-called “Negro dialect” or “black-cent” and its attendant loudness—but are aberrant and unelectable because of it, a sonic standard that does not appear to apply to white people. After all, the preceding two white presidents were known for their distinctive dialects and the ways in which they used them to mobilize their respective electorates; Bill Clinton’s soft-spoken Southern drawl was often read as smooth, intimate, and reassuring during the 1990s and George Bush’s folksy Texas-by-way-of-Andover twang attempted to sonically bridge the gaping class divides in the Republican coalition. But even before the recent debates that have pitted Obama’s “coolness”–itself a racialized jazz form of “quiet revolution” a la Miles Davis–against the imagined explosive heat of his anger, contemporary pundits heard the sound of Obama’s crisp, cosmopolitan voice with anxious and divisive ears, leading some to question his “blackness” and his political commitment to black people (Salon,“Colorblind,” 1.22.07)while still others called his baritone “magic” and immediately connected its resonant qualities with Martin Luther King Jr.’s, despite clear differences of tone, cadence, and regional inflection (Salon,“Does Obama’s Baritone Give Him an Edge?”2.28.2008).
Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) Listens to Obama Speak
In other words, Americans continue to hear Obama’s voice through the historical filter of “loudness” and the so-called “Negro dialect” whether or not Obama wants them to and whether or not he “wanted to have one.” While Reid’s prompt and profuse apologies to Obama may have pulled the story from the news cycle—the President called the remarks “unfortunate”—the phenomenon Reid’s clumsy words exposed remains an invisible yet palpable cultural force in the U.S., one whose longer historical genealogy has yet to be reckoned with. Sure to be labeled “rowdy” for beginning to do so, Reed’s recent commentary suggests that Obama’s social and historical knowledge has led him to an astute awareness of “when not to shout” that white Liberals need to recognize. I offer a perhaps less consoling conclusion, that we need to concentrate less on the sound of Obama’s voice and more on the racialized listening practices that can radically distort public discourse in this country. Unless we understand (and eventually dismantle) the relationship between the dominant American “listening ear” and the sonic color-line that shapes it for many (white) liberals and conservatives alike, we will continue to shout into the wind.
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Listening to Kansas City
The reality of our time is that we listen more readily and with greater interest to the mediated treatment of soundscapes [by artists] than to the material in its original form and context.–R. Murray Schafer, “Sensing the City” (Lecture)
For this month’s post I want to walk you through my current urban home, Kansas City, as I try to listen to it in its “original form and context” as Schafer encourages us to do. I consider myself a city gal (notwithstanding one who grew up in the country) and I love cities; the fact that I have been able to return to a city fills me with joy. I am a new transplant to Kansas City, so there is a lot that is new to me. One of the ways I am exploring Kansas City is through sound.
I wanted to do a sound walk because I felt my point of view was that of an outsider, tourist: I just moved to Kansas City over the summer, so my sound memories of Kansas City are almost like a clean slate (more on that later). You might say I’m somewhat of a soundscape tourist, as Schafer calls it. Also, part of my research focuses on how our listening practices help construct our homespaces—and those listening practices are not limited to simply the music we listen to. I believe we construct our “home” through the way we listen to it, the sounds we create, and how we remember sounds. For example, some of my memories of growing up in Puerto Rico are related to sound. I remember going home for the weekend when I was in college, and lying in bed awake listening to all the sounds of the countryside. It amazed me that we were surrounded by sounds (night birds, crickets, cars, horses, cows, dogs, snores, bugs) even though the country was remarkably quieter from the city I lived in during the week. Now that I live in Kansas City, I want to keep a close eye/ear on my sonic surroundings.
For those of you unfamiliar with sound walks, it is a method conceived by Schafer, composer and acoustic ecologist, to explore the soundscape. It consists in walking through a particular area and taking stock of the sounds around you. Schafer helped develop the World Soundscape Project at Simon Frasier University, a project that wanted to research the sonic environments we live in. Interestingly enough, Schafer was not a fan of the sounds of cities, and went so far as to state that “noise pollution is one of the main problems in urban life.” I am familiar with this now-common complaint of urban locations. However, my sound walk yielded a different result.
My sound walk took place this past Saturday, December 11. The day started out cool, but the temperatures dropped quickly past midmorning. The cold, added to the wind chill factor in the single digits, cut my sound walk short. Since part of what I want to do with this sound walk project is take stock of the sounds of my home, I started by walking along streets close to my apartment that I usually drive along. I walked along the thoroughfares I use the most: 39th Avenue/Street (we live close to the Kansas/Missouri border), Adams Street, and 43rd Street. (See the map below.)
As I prepared myself to face the dropping temperatures, I thought to myself about Kansas City’s sounds. One of the first memories I have of Kansas City is the sound of the cicadas. I came in early September 2009 to visit my boyfriend, who lived by Country Club Plaza. The sounds of bell chimes, horns, cars, and people didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me. What irked me was the loud biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiizzzzzzzzzzzzz of the cicadas late at night, when the Plaza was still and quiet. When I woke up at night, that sound haunted me. I did not expect the deafening sound of the cicadas when I came here. I hadn’t noticed it when we first parked in front of the building, but once I had settled into bed I couldn’t ignore them. The bizz followed me that long weekend, and even when I returned to New York I could remember clearly the sound. I found it annoying at first; I could barely sleep that first night. But now that I am here I think of it as part of the sounds of my new home. It’s nice to know that there’s a sound that’s exclusively Kansas Citian for me. (Here is a link to an NBC Action News clip on the cicadas. Click on the video to hear them loud and clear.)
I started by jotting down the sounds I noticed as I walked. At the beginning I wanted to jot down every single sound, and it got to the point where I wasn’t listening anymore; I was analyzing instead of listening. After I turned onto Genesee Street and I noticed some of the sounds kept on repeating, I decided to just listen for now and write later. The sound walk was a lot more enjoyable when I could listen unfettered.
There were few people out on Saturday. I shouldn’t be surprised because it was cold outside (26 degrees with a wind chill of 13 when I checked a few blocks away from the apartment), but I missed hearing the sounds of humans, not sounds manufactured by humans, but sounds emanating from human bodies: coughing, talking, singing, walking…However, I tried to not listen to my own sounds. It sounds silly, but I was trying to listen to sounds other than my own. When I noticed this, it shocked me: why should I not write down the sounds I make, unconsciously or consciously? I am a part of the soundscape; why not keep track of the sounds I make? All of a sudden I felt like I was a lot louder than I actually was. My boots hitting the sidewalks, my pant legs rubbing up against each other, and my mouth chewing gum.
There were a lot of chimes out there. This was interesting to me; I have three windchimes on my terrace, and this is a sound that has become part of my soundscape. I like how sometimes I go to bed and in the still of the night I can hear my chimes shaking in the wind. Now that I think of that I wonder if other my neighbors find them annoying.
Some other sounds I heard repeatedly were: flags flapping against poles, cars zipping past me, wind blowing in my ears, gum smacking, boots against pavement, leaves rustling. The sound of the wind seemed to envelope me, and it howled louder between the branches and the houses. But once the wind died down and the leaves stopped rustling and the sound of my shoes faded into the background, I could hear a hum, barely audible but still existent. I wonder if it’s the hum of the expressway (1-35), or the hum of the air filters at the hospital (KU Med). I could hear it when I was at my farthest from my house but also when I was closest. I think of it as the hum of the city. If when we are super quiet we can hear our bodies breathe, the hum can be the city breathing, all of its sounds coming together as one. I’d like to think so.
I plan on doing three more walks, one per season coming up, as a way to get to know my new city and to continue exploring city sounds. It would be awesome if we could put together a sound walk project of Kansas City, similar to other sound projects in other urban locations. (New York seems to be a popular location for sound walks.) If anything, a sound walk is a great way to get to know your area, rediscover it with new ears.
Bonus track: After the map you will find a link to an audio clip from my sound walk. Also, if you’re interested in doing a sound walk of your own, click on the following links to find out more.
http://www.cityinasoundwalk.org/
http://soundslikestatenisland.com/take-soundwalk
http://www.coldstare.50megs.com/old%20soundwalk/Pagetwo.html
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