Spreading the sonic color line in American policy debate. Issue 4 (1st October 2020) - Eisenstadt, Michael
ABSTRACT: Auditory privacy is an unequally distributed resource. Inequitable access to the auditory shield, a practice that excludes the public from educational spaces to allow for experimentation with convictions and beliefs, serves as a reminder that sound is raced. This analysis of American-style intercollegiate policy debate pays specific attention to the different adjectives used by media outlets to describe the sound of self-identified white debaters and Black debaters "spreading, " a technique with which speakers provide as many arguments as possible within the given time limits and by which they generate an auditory shield. While this study finds that all participants generally have some access to debate's experimental space, the surplus sound created by the spread prompted commentators to praise white debaters for their rigor while characterizing Black debaters as inadequate. Their assessments, which dismissed Black voices merely on the basis of how they sounded, fell along what Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls "the sonic color line." These reactions illustrate the inequities within the pedagogical spaces in which students practice dialogue and deliberation.