52 research outputs found
Flyer News, Vol. 59, No. 15
Student-run newspaper of the University of Dayton
Black Noise, White Ears: Resilience, Rap, and the Killing of Jordan Davis
I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman comes up and says, âTell me how you feel but donât say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.â But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? â Audre Lorde (2007, 125), on being tone-policed by a colleague
I am a black woman over six feet tall. My laugh sounds like an exploding mouse. I squeak loudly and speak quickly when I get excited. I like knock in my trunk and bass in my music. . . . 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. â Regina Bradley (2015), on the âsonic disrespectabilityâ of Sandra Bland
1. cops and demons
Around noon on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer named Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. Later, when facing a grand jury, Wilson testified to Brownâs formidable, animalistic attributes:
And when I grabbed him [Brown], the only way I can describe it is I felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. . . . The only way I can describe itâit looks like a demon. . . . As he is coming towards me, I tell [him], keep telling him to get on the ground, [but] he doesnât. I shoot a series of shots. . . . At this point, it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that Iâm shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasnât even there, [like] I wasnât even anything in his way. Well, he keeps coming at me after that again. During the pause I tell him to get on the ground, get on the ground; he still keeps coming at me, gets about 8 to 10 feet away. At this point Iâm backing up pretty rapidly. Iâm backpedaling pretty good because I know if he reaches me, heâll kill me. . . . I saw the last one [bullet] go into him. And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank; the aggression was gone. It was goneâI mean, I knew he stopped. The threat was stopped (State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, Grand Jury Volume V 2014, 212, 225, 227â28, 228â229).[1]
âDemonâ wasnât the âonly wayâ Darren Wilson could have described eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. But the criminalizing epithet helped this officer dodge indictment. For how else should Wilson have reacted when staring down a resilient beast that can charge through bullets? In the courtroom, the locutionary gambit of only wayâdemon (no alternative words) slid into the self-defense justification of only choiceâkill (no alternative actions).[2] Aside from allegedly slinging âfuck,â âpussy,â and other curse words around, this teenager had, according to Wilson, simply uttered âgrunting, like, aggravated sound[s]â (227).[3] To the ears and eyes of this cop, Brown was nonverbal (made inchoate noises), nonaural (didnât listen to orders), nonvisual (looked straight through Wilson).[4] Nonhuman.
Wilsonâs testimony painted Brown as a thug with impenetrable skin and impenetrable ears. Impenetrableâmeaning organs resistant to supersonic bullets and clarion instructions alike. Dehumanizing and deadly consequences spawn from these myths of black bruteness. Multiple recent studies have shown the tendencies of white research subjects to overestimate the size, speed, and age of black people. Such âformidability bias,â scientists argue, can expectedly â[promote] participantsâ justifications of hypothetical use of force against Black suspects of crimeâ (Wilson, Rule, and Hugenberg 2017, 59). Take the tragedy of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who, while playing with an Airsoft toy gun in a Cleveland park on November 22, 2014, was shot and killed by police officer Timothy Loehmann.[5] In his signed statement to investigators, Loehmann declared that Rice âappeared to be over 18 years old and about 185 poundsâ (Loehmann 2015).[6] Later, in defending Loehmannâs use of lethal force, Cleveland Police Patrolmenâs Association president Steve Loomis likewise urged the public not to trust their own eyes when it came to photos and videos of this pre-teen: âHeâs menacing. Heâs 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasnât that little kid . . . youâre seeing in pictures. Heâs a twelve-year-old in an adult bodyâ (Stahl 2016).[7]
Or was he just a twelve-year-old in a black body?
Racist demonstrations of formidability bias similarly broke out in the aftermath of civilian George Zimmermanâs 2012 shooting of the unarmed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida (Figure 1). Zimmermanâs supporters complained about the newsâ circulation of a photo showing a beaming and âmuch youngerâ Martin (Capehart 2013). One defiant reader sent a Washington Post journalist a more âhonestâ picture that was making the rounds on the Internet, a picture of an âup-to-dateâ Martin with face tattoos and a sizeable frame (Capehart 2013). Except, it turns out, this wasnât Trayvon Martin (b. 1995) at all; it was a photo of the rapper Jayceon Terrell Taylor (a.k.a. The Game, b. 1979) (Sanders 2012). Such blatant examples of fake news are usually easy to debunk. Subtler cases of pictorial deceit, however, can prove more elusive yet no less toxic. In April 2012, for instance, people accused Fox News of darkening Trayvon Martinâs skin with Photoshop, a facile manipulation that, as one critic put it, approximated âjournalistic lynchingâ via colorist stigma (Marc NC 2012; Summers 2012). (Several readers likened this case of colorism to the doctored image of O.J. Simpson on a 1994 cover of TIME magazine.)[8] Darker, blacker, meaner, stronger.
Formidability myths go beyond overestimations of how resilient black bodies look (exteriorities). These myths concurrently enable underestimations of black bodiesâ capacity to feel (interiorities). In a 2014 study, researchers found that white children, beginning as early as age seven, believe their black peers to possess reduced susceptibility to physical pain.[9] Much injustice has historically sprung from white denials of black nociception. âPain bias,â sometimes called the âracial empathy gap,â is complicit in the societal normalization of black trauma (Wade 2013; Silverstein 2013; Forgiarini, Gallucci, and Maravita 2011).[10] Physicians today prescribe lower and fewer doses of pain medication to black patients, including black children (Hoberman 2012; Hoffman, Trawalter, Axt, and Oliver 2016; Graham 2014). Police use more severe physical force on dark-skinned bodies (Buehler 2017). Therapists, through buy-in of the Strong Black Woman trope, disproportionately trivialize black womenâs requests for mental healthcare (West, Donovan, and Daniel 2016). Or we could look back to the era of US chattel slavery, during which white doctors forced black women to undergo childbirth without anesthetic chloroform, even when infants had to be delivered âwith the aid of the blunt hookâ (Schwartz 2006, 167).[11] Slaveholdersâ assumptions that black women were generally âstrong enough to endure any painâ further warranted their subjection to every other abuse, including rape (Wyatt 2008, 60; see also Staples 1970). Past and present, these racist fantasies of black painlessness have resonated with what Alexander Weheliye terms the âpernicious logics of racialization,â referring to a âconglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumansâ (2014, 3).[12] To Weheliyeâs taxonomy, we should add the fantastical category of black superhumansâresilient bodies ironically relegated to dehumanized status. Certainly, being bulletproof, like Marvel superhero Luke Cage, could be the devout wish of black people who face police and precarity. Being perceived as bulletproof is the mortal fear.[13]
Overestimations of physical and emotional resilience can be curses in disguise.[14] âStop calling me RESILIENT,â insisted Tracie Washington in her iconic 2005 flyers, which she nailed to telephone poles throughout New Orleans in response to the US mediaâs coverage of Hurricane Katrina. âBecause every time you say, âOh, theyâre resilient,â that means you can do something else to meâ (Slater 2014, Figure 2). Donât explain to me what you think I can survive, proclaimed Washington; ask me what my sunken city needs.[15] Washingtonâs message should remind us that to mythologize black bodies as indomitable is to reify systems of racist domination. Put differently, professing to know what someone is capable of can risk sliding into neoliberal presumptions of what the person can be subjected toâpain, labor, tribulation, trauma. Obviously, black people are resilient. Itâs just that, historically speaking, bad things happen when white people overeagerly celebrate, fetishize, or exploit the obviousness of this notion.
Sure, if youâre white, go ahead and admire Strong Black Women, so long as you remember that their strength isnât for you to test, in the same way their hair isnât yours to touch.
Formidability bias and pain bias together entail an overestimation of black peopleâs strength, size, age, and resilienceâcharacteristics of physical excess. As a music scholar, Iâve lately wondered how biases about physical excess might intersect and compound with analogous prejudices about black sonic excess. Black people face accusations of protesting too forcefully (Black Lives Matter, âuppity-ism,â the Angry Black Woman), laughing too boisterously (the 2015 Napa Valley wine train skirmish), playing music too loudly (âJeep Beatsâ and racial epithets), and shouting in the movie theater (Robinson 2016, 134â58; Cheng 2017, 528â49; Duff 2016; Radano 2000, 459â80).[16] For resentful listeners, black noise is like dirt; it is, to paraphrase the anthropologist Mary Douglas, sonic âmatter out of placeâ (1966, 44).[17] And dirt is an apt simile because, beginning in the nineteenth century, scientific discourses of American hygiene have churned out stigmas of non-white bodies as âdirtyâ and âimpureââwhich, as the historian Carl Zimring points out, are viciously hypocritical given how environmental racism (the inequitable allocation of waste and toxins) overwhelmingly harms communities of color (2015, 3â5; see also Godsil 1991; Pulido 2000; Boer, Pastor Jr., Sadd, and Snyder 1997; Casey et al. 2017). Indictments of black sonic impurities ultimately hinge on the following twin assumptions: black bodies make noise; and black ears can takeâembrace, withstand, shrug offânoise. Diagnoses of black ears and policings of black noise have often accompanied insidious policies, from the Antebellum Southâs pseudo-medical treatises about the auditory ânerves of the Negroâ to the present-day fiascos that generate memes of #LaughingWhileBlack, #SingingWhileBlack, and #TalkingWhileBlack (Nott [1844] 1981, 223).[18] Some of these hashtags are meant to be humorous. Far from mere funny business, though, prejudices about black noise can pose grave consequences. Stereotypes about âthe âdeepâ black voice, the ânoisyâ neighborhood, [and] the âloudâ music,â notes the race theorist Jennifer Lynn Stoever, expose âincidents of racist listening [that] cannot be dismissed, laughed off, or chalked up to white ignorance and/or innocenceâ (2016, 277). Altogether, stereotypes of black physical excess and black sonic excess implicate the threatening physicalities of black sound and, in turn, the threatening sounds of black physicality.
In this article, I bear witness to how white misimaginations of black skin, black ears, and black voices in the United States have subtly yet severely abetted racist ideologies that dehumanize, discredit, or outright destroy black life. In the articleâs first half, I tug at knotty cultural stereotypes of black resilience and sonic excess. Why are certain expressions of black empowerment deemed respectable, whereas other expressive modes face denunciation and censorship? And how can black-coded musical genresâsay, rap, a lynchpin in culture warsâconstruct and deconstruct myths about the formidability of black bodies? I arrange these primers on resilience, respectability, and rap to triangulate a case study in the articleâs latter half, the 2014 criminal trial People of the State of Florida v. Michael David Dunn. Nicknamed the âLoud Music Trial,â this case involved a white civilian named Michael Dunn who, one evening at a Florida gas station, noticed rap music coming from a parked SUV. Dunn approached the SUV and asked the black youths inside the vehicle to turn their music down. When they refused, Dunn launched into a heated argument with one of the boys, a high school student named Jordan Russell Davis. The confrontation ended with Dunn pulling out a handgun, unloading ten rounds, and shooting Davis through the heart.
As a high-profile case, People v. Dunn received abundant news coverage in 2014 and served as the subject of a 2015 documentary called 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets. I have drawn insights from these sources as well as from my own multiple viewings of the complete trial footage.[19] But Iâm supplementing this research with materials that eluded mainstream press: Dunnâs jailhouse letters and phone calls (largely omitted from the trialâs formal proceedings); stenographersâ transcriptions of courtroom sidebars (inaudible to gallery members and not picked up by the AV teamâs microphones); discovery documents, evidence techniciansâ reports, and 9-1-1 records (now publicly available); and my recent conversations with Jordanâs parents, Ron Davis and Lucy McBath.
Jordan Davis was 17 years old, 145 pounds, 5â11ââ, and unarmed. Michael Dunn was 47 years old, 250 pounds, 6â4ââ, and armed. Yet according to Dunnâs testimony, Davis had âthreatened my life like a manâ and became âlouder and louder and more violent and more violentâ with every word (Testimony by Defendant 2014, 2956).[20] Or as Dunn told the police: âI didnât know he was seventeen. I thought he was a full-grown man. I thought they all were. And in my mind they were all going to get out of this truck and shoot me or beat me or kill meâ (âMichael Dunn Trial. Day 5. Part 6. Police Interrogation Tape Played,â ~4:35:00). Like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice (forever 18, 17, and 12), Jordan Davis was seen and heard as formidable beyond his years. Perceptions of loud blackness metamorphosed into fictions of criminal threat. Physical and sonic excess made flesh. Flesh unmade by bullets. âI had no choice but to defend myself,â said Dunn. âIt was life or deathâ (Testimony by Defendant 2014, 2958). Only choiceâkill.
More on People v. Dunn shortly. First, one of the caseâs essential themes; or, how resilience has become the new black.
Notes
See also Halpern (2015) and Travis Jr. (2016, 102â4).
Dorian Johnson, who had been walking with Michael Brown, witnessed the altercation. He recalled that Brown, after being struck by Wilsonâs first bullet, announced: âI donât have a gunâ (State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, Grand Jury Volume IV 2014, 123).
Wilson testified that Brown had said: âFuck what you have to say,â âWhat the fuck are you going to do about itâ (State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, Volume V 2014, 209), and âYou are too much of a pussy to shoot meâ (214).
Wilson claimed he had â[told Brown] to get on the ground, get on the ground,â and that âless than one minuteâ passed between â[seeing Brown] walking down the street until Michael Brown is dead in the streetâ (State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, Grand Jury Volume V 2014, 272).
Loehmann claimed he had âordered Tamir [Rice] three times to show his hands before opening fire,â though several witnesses later came forward to say they had heard no warnings at all (Blackwell 2015).
Timothy Loehmann, statement to investigators (signed and dated 30 November 2015).
The move to criminalize Rice didnât simply come from police officers. In an article for CNN, legal analyst Philip Holloway recommended that people âturn to the specific facts,â which include the following: âTamir Rice, while being a mere 12 years old, appeared much olderâ (Holloway 2015). For Holloway to classify Riceâs âolderâ appearance as âfactâ is all the more problematic given the authorâs legal credentials.
See Carmody (1994).
Authors summarized their findings as follows: âFive-, 7-, and 10-year-olds first rated the amount of pain they themselves would feel in 10 situations such as biting their tongue or hitting their head. They then rated the amount of pain they believed two other childrenâa Black child and a White child, matched to the childâs genderâwould feel in response to the same events. We found that by age 7, children show a weak racial bias and that by age 10, they show a strong and reliable racial biasâ (Dore, Hoffman, Lillard, and Trawalter 2014). See also Trawalter, Hoffman, and Waytz (2012).
Instructive though it may be, âracial empathy gapâ can nevertheless sound too neutral, absolvent, clinical, and bilateral, as if people of different races simply happen to lack empathy across color lines, and as if dark-skinned bodies arenât the ones who overwhelmingly pay for such a lackâpaying, at times, with their lives. Perhaps a more honest term would be racist empathy gap.
In contrast to their poor treatment of black women, the same physicians in the era of US chattel slavery usually âexpressed âa good deal of solicitudeâ for the white woman . . . [and] acted to relieve whatever discomfort she was experiencingâ (Schwartz 2006, 166). See also Bourke (2014) and Dudley (2012).
In other words, says Weheliye, blackness is a âchanging system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannotâ (2014, 3).
Empirical studies of âformidability biasâ and âpain biasâ are complemented by research on the âsuperhumanization biasâ and the âMagic Negro myth.â White research subjects have, in some cases, gone so far as to express beliefs in black peopleâs ability not only to withstand pain, but also to âsuppress hunger or thirstâ (Waytz, Hoffman, and Trawalter, 2015, 356).
For a similar example, Ana MarĂa Ochoa Gautier has noted Alexander von Humboldtâs nineteenth-century documentations of the physical resilience and indecency of the Colombian bogas, the Magdalena Riverâs boat rowers. As Ochoa Gautier points out, Humboldtâs âpositive impression of their tremendous physiques and âdemonstration of human forceâ . . . was muted by the sounds they made,â evidenced by this Prussian explorerâs ârepeated use of negative adjectives of excessâ such as âbarbarous, lustful, angryâ (2014, 31â32).
In Washingtonâs plea of âStop calling me RESILIENT,â then, âcallingâ is as much of a keyword as âRESILIENT.â To call someone something is to exert implicit control over description, designation, and diagnosis.
On the racial politics of âJeep Beatsâ and vehicular (black) noise, see Dery (2004, 407â20), Jasen (2016, 6â7), Kelley (1996, 134â35), Rose (1994, 61â62), and Blake (2012, 87â109). For historical perspectives on automobile sound systems, see Morris (2014).
In her groundbreaking book on the metaphors and materialities of hygiene (and its opposites), anthropologist Mary Douglas defined dirt as âmatter out of place,â or anything that âoffends against orderâ (1966, 44, 2); see also Kapchan (2017, 283). On dirt and blackness, see Fanon (2008, 82â86, 146â47); cf. Read (1996).
See also Smith (2006, 33â34), Kennaway (2016, 117â19), Chang (2016, 69â70), Markus (2015), and CTVNews.ca Staff (2017).
All cameras in the courtroom belonged to the documentary filmmakers for 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets. Full recordings of the trial and the retrial are available online and are cited in this article accordingly. I am grateful to Ron Davis, who has worked closely with the 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets team, for helping obtain access and permissions to original footage.
References to People of the State of Florida v. DUNN MICHAEL DAVID are hereafter abbreviated as People v. Dunn
Factor Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Automobiles
Three approaches are commonly identified for controlling automobile greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: reducing travel demand, improving vehicle efficiency and using alternatively (non-petroleum) fueled vehicles (AFVs). Similarly, sector emissions can be decomposed by travel distance, vehicle fuel intensity and fuel GHG ("carbon") intensity. Normalized analysis of these three factors offers valuable insights. For a broad set of conditions, any stringent GHG emissions limit for the automobile sector implies a limit of comparable stringency for fuel carbon intensity. However, carbon intensity is an abstraction of complex supply systems rather than an observable property of fuels (physical energy carriers) themselves. Carefully considering the locations and current magnitudes of fuel-related emissions implies that the proper policy focus is on upstream sectors that supply fuel rather than the choice of fuels downstream in the auto sector. Therefore, other than fundamental R&D, programs to promote AFVs are not currently warranted for climate protection. In addition to managing travel demand and improving vehicle efficiency, the implied climate policy priority is limiting net GHG emissions in fuel supply sectors. Future work is needed to develop GHG management policies for liquid fuel supply systems involving fungible commodities and dynamic global supply chains.Clean Energy Research Center Clean Vehicle Consortium (CERC-CVC) under U.S. Department of Energy award number DE-PI0000012.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94306/1/Factoring Car-Climate Challenge Oct 2012.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94306/4/Factor Analysis of Auto GHGs 2012.pd
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