The deeper implications of sound are often disregarded, brushed over. But beneath the surface of sound, there are deep, painful racial roots. In the introduction to Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s book The Sonic Color Line, she discusses the issues and tensions between sound and race, and how sounds are often more than just sounds. “These sounds, heard and unheard, have stories. If we listen, we can hear resonances with other times and places: segregation’s hostile soundscapes, the obedient listening that whites expected of slaves, the screams and prayers of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester” (Stoever 3). Just like the sad songs of the slaves in W.E.B. du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Stoever writes about how the sonic color line has resulted in the creation of two vastly different cultural contexts, on both sides of the line, with both sides containing deep feelings within sound. Though time has moved past slavery, the resentment still exists, just now in the confrontations with police officers regarding speeding tickets and the quiet student at her desk. A black person is to be neither too loud or too quiet, or else to upset the white person with a gun. So, how does this society move past this way of treating each other? Is there any way to wipe away the stories of the past of sound and to end this violence based around sound, or are we doomed to this violent sonic color line forever?
