Spreading the sonic color line in American policy debate

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.

KEYWORDS:

• sound
• pedagogy
• auditory shield
• debate spread
• sonic color line

In Fall 2008, the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Richard Lake reported on the success of his local college debate team. He was horrified upon listening to a speech. The speaker, he reported, “waves his arms, sucks in breaths so quick and deep he sounds like a dolphin. What comes out of his mouth seems ridiculous.”¹ Lake smashed words together to illustrate how it sounded, observing it “made no sense” and remarked “it sounds like, one long string of unseparated words, like a comedic performance without the comedy.”² The reporter confronted what is known in the debate community as “spreading,” the practice of speaking rapidly so as to include as many arguments as possible within a time limit. For Lake, the spread was “completely incomprehensible.”³ Lake’s experience resonates with those who imagine competitive debate as an exercise in public eloquence and are shocked to find it is otherwise.

Yet, those familiar with American-style competitive policy debate recognize that the activity’s aims are not training better public speakers, but making better critical thinkers. Advocates of spreading argue that it forces students to calculate the best counterattacks, weigh outcomes, evaluate claims, and make tactical concessions.⁴ This essay does not evaluate those claims and instead examines how spreading is heard by different listening communities and how those communities project raced and racist codes onto speakers. What is missing from studies about debate is sustained analysis of the sonic dimensions of spreading. To address that gap, I attune to the lower frequencies of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man and attend to the color of spreading’s sonic qualities.⁵ Spreading involves breath, vibrating vocal cords, and oscillating pressure. I define sound as “vibrating air molecules apprehended by the body and consciously registered as” culturally significant.⁶ In addition to overwhelming an opponent with arguments they must refute, spreading creates an auditory space for debaters to experiment with ideas. Spreading provides a paradigm example of an “auditory shield,” an ephemeral, sonorous space that facilitates experimentation removed from the “public ear,” and shielded from the assumption that a body’s external arguments/sounds reflects interior convictions/states.⁷ The auditory shield provides a mobile space to play with ideas, positions, and commitments without the risk of public distraction or interference. Yet, access to that space is not equitable and depends on the speaker’s positionality. This study shows the pedagogical space of the auditory shield to be fragmented along the sonic color line, an auditory racial assumption that governs and influences listening. Specifically, when Black students try to access that space to experiment with ideas, some publics perceive the sound of their voices as dangerous, violent, and unstable—assessments that potentially pose risks to their programs, a tournament, and the pedagogical benefits of the auditory shield.

I explore two cases of policy debate teams spreading and the corresponding media reception of those debates. The adjectives commenters used to describe the spread illustrate how listeners construct sound differently. According to those accounts, an all-white team from University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) sounded intellectual, competitive, and humorous while an all-Black team from Towson University sounded devious, scary, and improper. Raced assumptions creeped in, describing one team as intellectual, prestigious, and proper and the other as savage, inappropriate, and violent. While the public ear might have distinguished speech from conviction (as debate tournaments intend), the associations that listeners made with the sound of Black voices were based on faulty reasoning. The associations turned to public scorn when Towson’s team won a national championship, drawing national attention and sparking a very public controversy.

This essay extends into sound and pedagogy studies and takes up Chris McRae and Keith Nainby’s invitation to explore “listening in the classroom as a starting place for considering what a pedagogical emphasis on an ethic of listening might sound like.”⁸ They argue that listening is “a necessary constitutive element” of pedagogy, revealing “our ethical relation to one another.”⁹ I extend this work, moving from ethics to politics, arguing that auditory privacy is an example of an unequally distributed and raced pedagogical resource. Although sound creates enclaves for some people to test commitments and eventually forge convictions, potentially enhancing democratic decision-making, those benefits are withheld from others. Some voices are cast as unhinged and speakers are asked to invent alternative forms of reasoning.¹⁰ Additionally, the auditory shield intervenes in the subdiscipline of debate pedagogy and its influence on democratic education. While the experimental “switch-side” format is integral to most debate pedagogy, few have considered its sonorous elements. A more robust account of the sonority enables study of the practice outside the logocentric language of “strategic trade-offs” that are common to prior research on debate pedagogy. This study instead surfaces the activity’s racialized elements.

The public ear

An ordinary argument offers conclusions supported with data. Yet rarely is an argument received at face value. An auditor also relies on sonorous cues such as inflection, emphasis, and pause to make sense of an argument and reconstruct it, a process that involves a “public ear,” with “public” here referring to the dynamic social nature of engaging someone in their capacity as a fellow community member. A public ear is related to what Justin Eckstein has called a public mode of audition.¹¹ While Eckstein used a public mode of audition to underscore how some sounds supply generic topoi for an arguer to draw from, the public ear describes how citizens listen to others arguing over the interest of the common good. Citizens reconcile costs and benefits of a potential policy action to the community against possible ethical implications. Listening to a member of the public relies on audible assumptions required to reconstruct ordinary language into a series of propositions and statements, turning vibrations into audible sound. Beyond interpreting linguistic content, the public ear processes a series of meta-assessments attempting to discern internal states of a speaker based on some sounds, such as conviction, emotion, and sincerity.¹² An argument is thus more than the words: it is also the tone, volume, and timbre. The public ear pieces all of this together into a holistic inference, helping listeners to draw conclusions.

The cultural assumptions that guide the public ear are shaped by the contemporary media environment. As Amanda Nell Edgar explains, “audience experiences with other mediated voices and bodies, as the attachment of particular bodies to particular voices is repeated across media forms and throughout history, forming racialized and gendered conventions,” laying the foundation for future media representations, and creating what Edgar has called “layered cultural cycles” that “imbue voices with bodies, marking physical characteristics, personality traits, and intelligence levels.”¹³ The voice offers a complex cultural channel that appears natural and attached to bodies. Media representations repeatedly attach the same kinds of sounds to Black bodies, depicting them, for instance, as overwrought, loud, and brash compared with white bodies, a practice that enacts what Jennifer Lynn Stoever has called “the sonic color line.” The concept explains how and why “certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds—and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between ‘whiteness’ and ‘Blackness.’”¹⁴ White supremacy, then, constitutes what sounds reasonable, labeling anything else deviant, Other, or aberrant. The result is a set of expectations organizing the world that designate some things noise and other things sound. When media invokes the sonic color line, it is not a passive reflection, but an ongoing activity shaping future auditions.

Through her archival work, Stoever unaired sounds from the past to show how different gestures, rituals, and habits were ascribed different racialized meanings. She found that dominant cultural assumptions surrounding bodies of color were informed by media portrayals that associated people of color with anger, rage, and noise. The sonic color line manifests in binaries like proper/improper, sound/noise, reasonable/unreasonable, and quiet/loud, with the latter in each case used to label Black individuals. These labels can be attached to feelings and affect that may shape split-second, life-and-death decisions, say at a traffic stop, as was the case with Sandra Bland, who told an officer that she knew her rights in the wrong tone. The officer subsequently tazed her and she died while in police custody.¹⁵ Sonic politics govern the expression of dissent in public spaces. The public ear and the sonic color line determine what it means to make an argument in public in the first place.

The educational philosophy behind the auditory shield

Sounds can be used to design spaces that are more or less desirable for argumentation.¹⁶ The original purpose of public fountains in parks, for instance, was to give visitors auditory privacy. Therapists have used white noise machines for the same reason. An auditory shield likewise is the creation of excess sound that makes the content of speech unintelligible to public ears. Although the public ear allows for citizens to meet in the public square to debate over the costs and benefits of a position, speakers sometimes need strategies to evade being heard.

In educational philosophies that center public life and the democratic potential of learning environments, some advocate pedagogical interactions that directly involve the public ear. Rosa A. Eberly, for instance, has called for students and academics to become citizen critics, gathering in public and deliberating over issues of common concern.¹⁷ This approach may not always be appropriate. Viewing individuals in learning environments as a public puts too much pressure on anything said in that space. Statements might be perceived as a permanent belief, which could chill speech and experimentation with ideas. Some students need an opportunity to fail with ideas before they are held accountable for them. They may need to advocate and test those ideas before they commit to those beliefs. Experiences with digital public spheres may lead students to fear that their static learning environments are unsafe for exploring ideas or advocating for unpopular beliefs without distraction or public interference. There must be a space for playing with ideas without public sanction. An auditory shield provides both temporary reprieve from the public ear and the pedagogical space for playing with and testing beliefs.

John Dewey conceived of pedagogy as a series of educational spaces where students formed and shaped their mental and moral dispositions. To accomplish this goal, he believed educational spaces could not be open to the public for two reasons. First, educational spaces function as simplified social organs. The public is too complex for students “to be assimilated in toto.”¹⁸ Instead, educational spaces gradually introduce students to “[b]usiness, politics, art, science, religion,” and so forth.¹⁹ The intimacy of learning environments prepares students for the social and political arenas they eventually enter. This does not suggest educational spaces lack social qualities or are disconnected wholly from public life. “Many private acts are social,” Dewey argued; “their consequences contribute to the welfare of the community or affect its status and prospects.”²⁰ Educational spaces have bestowed communities with “works of art, with scientific discoveries, because of the personal delight found by private persons in engaging in these activities,” making the exclusivity of such spaces “socially valuable both by indirect consequences and by direct intention.”²¹ The social value of an educational space extends beyond creation and discovery. It indirectly teaches students to take risks, becoming open and vulnerable to alternative, unfamiliar, and sometimes uncomfortable perspectives. Dewey’s second reason for closing educational spaces to the public was to ensure them free from the influence of outside stakeholders. Educational spaces, when insulated from public life, could free inhabitants from the influence of social and political environments to which they ordinarily belong, allowing them to test ideas from new perspectives. Dewey claimed that students participating in dialogue with multiple perspectives created a private, transactional learning process that prepared them for tackling public problems later on. He said:

When A and B carry on a conversation together the action is a trans-action  …  the activity lies between them; it is private . . . . The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.²²

This transactional process was “the line between private and public,” a line that was “to be drawn on the basis of the extent and scope of the consequences of acts which are so important as to need control, whether by inhibition or promotion” in order to maintain a learning environment as an experiential medium.²³ If no measures are taken to separate educational spaces from public life, “they tend to encroach on one another.”²⁴ If public life encroaches on the sanctity of education, the moral and social quality of pedagogy suffers. Dewey contended “effective moral training” could only occur in educational spaces if certain conditions were met. The most significant condition is that an educational space must “be a community life in all which that implies. Social perceptions and interests can only be developed in a genuinely social medium—one where there is give and take in the building up of a common experience.”²⁵ To be a genuinely social medium, an educational space must be set apart from public life, yet form “a miniature social group in which study and growth are incidents of present shared experience.”²⁶ The ideal educational space for Dewey was “a special territory” for individuals, forming “the whole ground of experience,” yet remaining “within its own boundaries.”²⁷

Sound, as a strategic tool, may exclude the public through its form, force, and flow, creating different kinds of privacy.²⁸ Sound can manipulate intensity, frequency, and timing that may require virtuosity to discern (form), it can increase or slow down the speed of a sound (flow), or it can amplify a sound (force) in ways designed to exclude the public ear. Any of these vectors can exclude the public and create an auditory shield, enabling free experimentation. The form of an auditory shield may require virtuosity to discern in sounds information available only to members of that community. For example, a group that primarily communicates via telegraph must understand Morse code to interpret messages. The flow of an auditory shield likewise may have a high velocity and move at a rate that outsiders do not understand. As I demonstrate with the practice of spreading, only a community trained to listen to speech at rapid rates of delivery can understand what is being said. Or, the force of an auditory shield may simply be too much for an outsider to withstand.²⁹ It is important to note that an auditory shield may form if any one or more of these characteristics are present. The form, force, and flow of sound may each provide inventional sites to create an auditory shield. Sometimes, the shield can never be penetrated, as is the case with a waterfall, creating a temporary cocoon of auditory privacy for those enclosed in the sound.

Ultimately, creation of an auditory shield demands unique modes of audition for its members, and when the need for argumentation between members arises, a set of judges or “referees” to evaluate the arguments made by those members.³⁰ Beyond evaluating claims in the content of a speech, the form of communication itself will have characteristics unique to a private group. When considering the sonority of a speech act, private sounds require specialized modes of audition, providing degrees of intimacy to speakers. Given the expertise needed to meet the demands of a specialized knowledge form, members of the public are unlikely to offer substantive contributions for evaluating arguments made by requisite experts. The lack of public oversight permits members to loosen convictions, exploring potential avenues without being beholden to public popularity. This allows space for democratic experimentation and informed judgments. The capacity for members of a community to produce democratic judgments on a range of issues depends on auditory privacy to keep influence from outside stakeholders at bay. Yet, I argue that access to auditory shields and their potential pedagogical benefits is unequal. While tournament debate may let students evade the assumption that a commitment is a conviction, the sonic color line also influences the meaning of the spread with adverse consequences for students of color.

Adoption of “the spread” in American-style policy debate

While there is much lore about who started the spread, I am interested primarily in the conditions that facilitated its emergence as a debate practice. In a longitudinal study of rates of delivery in the final rounds of the National Debate Tournament (NDT) from 1968 to 1980, William Southworth and Kent R. Colbert found that “the average (speaking rate) of all debaters observed” had “risen from about 200 wpm (1968) to 270 wpm (1980).”³¹ Colbert extended this study into 1985 and found an upward trend with speeds around 300 wpm.³² While it is difficult to isolate what exactly caused spreading as a common practice, I identify two conditions that enabled spreading to emerge in 1968: (1) cultural changes in the activity that shifted it from public speaking to a game that taught critical thinking and (2) NDT rule changes that normalized cross-examination and codified preparation time between speeches. When debaters positioned the activity as a game where arguments did not represent convictions, they had more time to figure out what they wanted to say, could complete in-depth research to sustain multiple positions, and could find more things to say than the time allowed. Combined, these three conditions drastically impacted the competitive dimensions of debate.

The debates analyzed in this study are American-style intercollegiate policy debates. In this two-person team switch-side debate format, a single controversy area and corresponding resolution is chosen for the entire academic competition season. Throughout a given competition season, debate teams conduct an abundance of research as arguments and strategies develop. It is not uncommon for individual team members to conduct research equivalent to that required of a Master’s level thesis project. Policy debate teams prepare both a set of affirmative propositions and a set of negative strategies responding to the range of potential affirmative propositions other teams may offer. Policy debate teams travel across the nation and compete against other colleges and universities at tournaments over the course of a season.

The two speeches analyzed in this essay are from American-style intercollegiate policy debates sanctioned by the Cross-Examination Debate Association (CEDA) and the NDT. As expected in American-style policy debates, the debaters who delivered these speeches engaged in the spread, a precondition for the auditory shield. While their delivery styles were the same, reception by the public ear differed dramatically. I follow Joshua Gunn’s injunction to “analyze how others affix adjectives—and by extension, nouns—to the sounds of someone’s voice; therein is where we can locate the (re)establishment of a binary and the movement of ideology.”³³ When debaters were perceived by listeners to be white participants, the public ear accepted the spread as a tool for constructing arguments at a rapid pace in an academically rigorous activity. However, when listening to Black participants, the public ear rejected the spread, claiming that American-style policy debate was not an academically rigorous activity. I illustrate the hostility toward Black debaters by analyzing public reactions to an all-Black national champion team from Towson University, comparing those with public impressions of a midrange team from UNLV to strengthen the contrast.

How a midtier debate sounds: UNLV³⁴

The 2011–2012 American policy debate season centered on the U.S. response to protest movements known as the Arab Spring. Specifically, the resolution for debate was, “Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its democracy assistance for one or more of the following: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.” This topic introduced issues involving whether the U.S.A. should assist protest movements with achieving a peaceful transition or whether such interventions would cause unnecessary interference.

During the tournament, UNLV proposed the following policy: “The United States Federal Government ought to substantially increase its local governance assistance for democratic capacity-building to Shaykhs and the Yemeni Youth Movement in the Republic of Yemen.” They made two arguments to support this policy. First, they presented Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as a growing threat in Yemen that would culminate in devastating attacks on the U.S.A. Second, UNLV argued that supporting local populations in Yemen was necessary for a peaceful regime transition. Encouraging Yemeni civilians to cooperate with the U.S.A., they claimed, would form a human intelligence network and increase the effectiveness of U.S. drone strikes targeting members of AQAP. By the end, UNLV had covered complex social topics ranging from international relations, democracy promotion, U.S. imperialism, and nonstate actors inciting terrorism to the relationship between the War on Terror and drone strikes.

In making their case, UNLV made numerous controversial claims that, if mistaken for their convictions, may have invited public backlash. They argued, for instance, that making drone strikes more effective was an ethical act, that the U.S.A. had an obligation to defeat a group that it characterized as a terrorist organization, and that imperialism was a necessary evil. While none of these claims necessarily represented the team’s convictions, they represented the team’s commitments in the debate given the policy they had proposed.

UNLV did not need to address any questions about their true convictions because the public ear was unable to comprehend the content of their speech due to its rapid pace. The auditory shield that spreading affords debaters established sonic distance between them and outside stakeholders. Fear of interference from a university authority, Internet groups, or even government officials, would have compromised UNLV’s ability to play and experiment with sensitive issues pertaining to the ethics of U.S. foreign policy. The auditory shield removed that fear.

Even while the public ear struggled to digest the content of UNLV’s speech, their performance was received positively. Commentary about their speech coalesced around two general themes: their use of the spread sounded comedic, and it also sounded rigorous and thus represented academic excellence. Despite the spread registering as little more than noise to the public ear, listeners perceived it to be a prestigious, rigorous intellectual activity when practiced by UNLV.

Throughout their analyses, commentators drew chess, lawyer, and shooting analogies to convey the precision, intention, and killer instinct they perceived in UNLV. The sound of UNLV’s spread proved less important than the internal traits commentators associated with those sounds. While the speech sounded like nonsense, commentators heard brilliance and a worthwhile educational activity behind the noise. Lake, for instance, who described the speaker’s debating as “jibber jabber,” also recognized that “[i]t teaches you perspective. It teaches you to see all sides of an issue. It teaches you how to become a better person by looking beyond yourself.”³⁵ While noting the speaker appeared to be staring at the audience like a “zombie,” Lake asserted that the “comedic fast-talking  …  makes you focus and teaches you to think fast too.”³⁶ The sound of the spread alone signaled to Lake that the speaker was “brash, young and full of energy.”³⁷ Lake also noted that while the spread sounded “nothing like a presidential debate,” its intensity “sounds like a lawyer.”³⁸ Paul Takahashi’s comments echo Lake’s. “Words shoot out,” Takahashi said of the spread, “at a rapid-fire rate of nearly 400 words per minute, more than twice the speed of a normal human conversation.”³⁹ Despite being unable to comprehend the information exchanged in the debate, Takahashi described the spread as “an academic endeavor steeped in tradition” and a prestigious “game of argumentative chess.”⁴⁰ These assessments signal the auditory shield working as intended to benefit the debater by creating a dissociative schema separating an external trait (the sound of jibber jabber) from an internal trait (the quality of a speaker’s reasoning).

When the auditory shield becomes a site of brilliance, the activity of debate is understood as a laboratory for academic excellence. This is evident in Takahashi’s remarks about the speaker representing the “scrappy team from Las Vegas,” for whom “speed becomes key” to perfecting a rigorous, “grueling regimen” of speaking for long periods at a fast rate.⁴¹ Brian Greenspun likewise noted the UNLV debater was “top notch on multiple fronts,” saying the speaker was “a star” and that it “was easy to see why their debate team is one of the best in the country.”⁴² Despite the speed of the spread, Greenspun claimed the speaker “excelled” in “style and technique,” and there “should be no debate” about the fact UNLV was “finally coming into its own  …  as a growing academic institution.”⁴³ Commentators did not make this same association between speed and rigor when covering the final round of the 2013–2014 CEDA National Championship, which was debated by two all-Black teams.

How a national championship debate sounds: CEDA National Championship

The 2013–2014 American policy debate season centered on the president’s war powers. Specifically, the resolution for debate was,

Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase statutory and/or judicial restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United States in one or more of the following areas: targeted killing; indefinite detention; offensive cyber operations; or introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities.

This topic introduced issues involving whether the President of the U.S.A. should be able to act on the war powers outlined in the U.S. Constitution without congressional or judicial limitations.

During the final debate of the CEDA National Championship, the affirmative team from the University of Oklahoma, composed of two Black men, argued that presidential war powers should be restricted because those powers were being weaponized against Black Americans. In response, the negative team from Towson University, composed of two Black women, argued that the affirmative’s strategy was inaccessible to nonmale individuals and consequently reproduced the cultural and societal norms that sustain whiteness.

Towson engaged in the spread, presumably with the hope of establishing the same kind of auditory shield that afforded UNLV privacy when they spoke. In this case, Towson were denied that experimental educational space based merely on how they sounded to the public ear. Even while the public ear did not necessarily understand specific arguments made during this debate, when an all-Black female team won a national debate championship in a historical first, Towson’s monumental moment was “marred by right-wing trolls  …  and well-meaning white liberals, too, who have mischaracterized and minimized their victory, attributing their win to white liberal guilt, rather than meritorious performance.”⁴⁴ Without referencing specific content from the debate, conservative periodicals heard Towson make false claims of racism and attributed their win to special treatment rather than academic achievement. An opinion piece by the Council of Conservative Citizens, for instance, charged Towson with “destroying college debate clubs via false accusations of racism” and claimed: “Black female debate team wins national tournament to make up for white privilege.”⁴⁵

The harshest claims about Towson’s performance centered on its sonorous elements and reinforced the sonic color line, a form of anti-Black discernment that organizes white supremacy through sound and listening. Some comments, which focused on the debaters’ voices and accompanying gestures, were explicitly anti-Black. Pete Papaherakles, for example, suggested that Towson’s “pacing and gesturing in the typical shuckin’ and jivin’” should have resulted in the team being “ejected from the contest.”⁴⁶ The racially coded reference to “shuckin' and jiving'” has a historical connotation that suggests the debaters were lying to white authority figures.⁴⁷ Papaherakles's anti-Black view of the debate became more explicit when he claimed the debaters’ performance violated “logic, intellect, order, dignity and discipline—all of the things that made Western civilization great and helped foster a government of the people.”⁴⁸ The Towson debaters, he concluded, represented “a base and savage culture that rewards ugliness, violence, profanity and disrespect.”⁴⁹ His descriptions of the Towson debaters as psychotic, savage, and violent, invoked a historical narrative in which the superiority of “civilized” Western culture justified the domination and exploitation of “savage” people.

Rod Dreher, a conservative columnist for American Conservative, pathologized Towson when describing their performance. He presented the sound of the spread as evidence of a “psychotic break,” “madness,” and “insanity,” all claims that position the speakers as beyond reason.⁵⁰ He went on to characterize the substance of their comments as “insult and abuse” and “chaos.”⁵¹ Here, exterior sounds indicate an interiority of deviance that warrants discipline and even exclusion. While the purpose of an auditory shield is to generate an ephemeral space for experimenting with how to reason ideas, for these debaters, its sound marked them as entirely unreasonable. That conclusion was then extended to the entire debate enterprise. Dreher contended that Towson’s victory demonstrated that “we must privilege gibberish and racial harangue  …  because facts and logic are—wait for it—racist.”⁵² Towson’s victory taught us, Dreher claimed, that “insult and abuse are legitimate forms of argument, and ultimately, that chaos wins, as long as it’s perpetrated by a minority claiming victim status.”⁵³ In his view, Towson’s speech acts were “not rational thought and argumentation,” but a signal of “the abandonment of structured argument entirely  …  that scant the development of those vital skills” debate supposedly trains its participants with.⁵⁴

Dreher’s response was hardly isolated. Other periodicals also enacted the sonic color line, using negatively valanced terms to describe the sounds of Towson’s speech and ascribing nefarious intentions to it. According to commentators, Towson sounded like they were having a mental breakdown. Dominic Lynch called the speeches “immature” and a “tirade,” contributing to “a lack of civility and decorum at recent competitions.”⁵⁵ Commentators went on to attribute the debaters’ external sounds to an internal predilection for cheating, lying, and breaking the rules of the game. In both UNLV and Towson’s cases, the sonic color line shaped how reason was heard. In Towson’s case, the color line denied that the performance was an exercise in reason. In either case, listeners did not know the specifics of the positions advanced, and in either case, it did not matter. Listeners already knew from the sound of the debaters alone whether the arguments were reasonable or not.

Conclusion

This analysis of how the two teams were heard by the public ear surfaces drastically different views of competitive debate. Both teams employed an identical strategy: the spread. Yet commentary on the practice was worlds apart. For the speaker from UNLV, the spread sounded like a competitive, intellectual chess player. Debaters from Towson, in contrast, were received as savage, immature, improper, and representative of devious techniques that qualified as misconduct and abuse. Appeals to academic rigor were wielded as an anti-Black weapon and Black students observed, “both explicitly and implicitly, from a deficit-based perspective.”⁵⁶ Anti-Black racism manifests in educational spaces by “masquerading in the form of academic tradition and standards.”⁵⁷ While the white competitor from UNLV was praised for being a star, a top-notch student, and displaying excellent style and technique, the Black competitors from Towson were compared with a hyperventilating auctioneer, incoherent, irrational, and insane. Such a sharp distinction in descriptions of speakers who are enacting the same practice is significant. The adjectives reflect the white sensibilities that govern the public ear. In the case of debate, that whiteness justifies assigning stereotypes to speakers based on raced assumptions without any knowledge of the specific content being discussed.

The sonic color line determines what counts as reasoned argument and speech. Instead of logical consistency, the public ear assesses the value of arguments in terms of raced sounds. While the auditory shield created by the spread may guard against scrutiny of the content of a competitor’s speech, it does not protect the competitor from the public ear’s racialized attunement to voice and tone. These assessments are rooted in a “white rationality” that depicts Black individuals as “irrational, untrustworthy, and odd.”⁵⁸ These anti-Black assessments of “people’s mental or ideological activities” are rooted in notions of insanity that work to deny reasoned argument.⁵⁹ Regardless of the content of a competitor’s speech, the color of their skin and tone of their speech subsume the performance and shape what the public ear hears.

Additionally, the sonic color line shaped listeners’ evaluation of these debates. For those who observed UNLV, debate was valuable and a game of intellectual chess that promoted academic rigor. Critics were interested in how the speakers conveyed their arguments, which critics assumed were good even without knowing what was said. It did not matter that the arguments themselves were unintelligible. Auditors felt confident commenting on the quality of the exchange of the ideas. In contrast, those who observed Towson did not hear a valuable activity and instead took it as a sign of a decline in American education. The fact that Towson’s was a national championship round did not matter. The perception of the Towson speakers as irrational rendered worthless the entire debate.

It might be tempting to dismiss these findings on the raced auditory shield as exclusive to Towson, but as Deven Cooper, the 2008 CEDA National Champion from Towson, pointed out, the double standard described here is endemic to competitive debate.⁶⁰ In 2013, for example, a team of two Black men from Emporia State University won two national championships, an unheard-of feat. Emporia was arguably one of the best debate teams ever. Yet, critics’ remarks about Emporia were similar to the ones made about Towson’s performance. The Washington Examiner commented that the duo from Emporia was “sophomoric to say the least” and “one of the most insanely idiotic things” the periodical had encountered.⁶¹ The columnist concluded that the “rambling, incoherent” speeches were not “even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone  …  is now dumber for having listened to it.”⁶²

Performed outside of the auditory shield and by the “ordinary rules” does not minimize the attacks on Black students. Such an approach introduces new risks, especially where the debater might offer positions that do not adhere to their convictions. Those risks were made apparent in 2012 during an intercollegiate policy debate at Harvard University between the University of Oklahoma and the University of West Georgia. Participants tackled sensitive issues involving anti-Black racism but spoke at a pace slower than what is typical of the spread. The West Georgia team critiqued whiteness and advocated for a metaphorical “end to white life.” Their metaphor did not suggest that white people literally die, but rather suggested that we end life that structurally disenfranchises Black people. Several online periodicals obtained footage of the debate, spliced up portions of the speeches, and published editorials about “white genocide” with inaccurate information that went viral. The Daily Wire referred to the debate as “insanity,” labeling the debaters from West Georgia “pro-genocide activists.”⁶³ LifeZette magazine published a similar editorial, mistakenly labeling the debaters from West Georgia “Black Lives Matter student activists” who called for white debaters to commit suicide.⁶⁴ In addition to experiencing the personal pain and feeling of entrapment that comes with making strategic or stimulating arguments, the West Georgia competitors were tormented by harsh, racist remarks and implicit threats to their safety.

Many Black competitive debaters, aware of the public ear’s raced response to the spread and the public risks of participating in switch-side debate, have experimented with conviction-based debate.⁶⁵ Such an approach supports speaking intentionally from a specific positionality, since racial identity is already marked by the way sound is raced. The challenge of transcending one’s identity was captured by one of the Towson debaters, who said, “For them to tell us that we can’t bring our personal experience, it would literally be impossible. Not just for Black people—it is true of everyone. We are always biased by who we are in any argument.”⁶⁶ The variety of styles among conviction-based debaters, all of whom speak from different positions and with their own nuances, shows that there is room for creativity within those constraints. But making debate a more inclusive space for Black debaters involves more than changing the activity. It also requires interventions in how debaters interface with the public.

Race shapes how an argument is heard and determines what counts as reason in the first place. If even the act of arguing is raced, then we need to account for that in any notion of technical, public, or private. Argumentation and advocacy need to start with an assumption of race first, before it can move forward. This requires not only thinking about argument from the perspective of invention, but also drawing attention to argument reception and the unequal distribution of resources.⁶⁷ The discipline is woefully ill-equipped to confront this problem and think critically about the intersection of race and reason. This was highlighted by a controversy over the National Communication Association’s selection of Distinguished Scholars. When scholars of color forwarded arguments about the racial bias evident in the selection process, some of the responses were “downright and openly racist,” characterizing merit and diversity as a binary rather than complementary of one another.⁶⁸ A sonic approach to pedagogy asks us to consider reception of arguments, in cases such as how we award our discipline’s highest honors and how those honors reflect policing the boundaries of the pedagogue. In these instances, a pedagogical focus on sound flips our priority from the invention of argument to its reception. Fortunately, “scholars of color have incessantly drawn attention to the modalities in which the whiteness and heteronormativity of the discipline excludes them,” and this work demonstrates how we must be attuned to sound as one such modality.⁶⁹

Much of the study of argumentation comes from Europe and reifies the commitments to colonialism that centers anti-Blackness. The technical, public, and private are understood as abstract space, unencumbered by uncomplicated histories of race. How can we affirm from within this historical context the assumption that argumentation—an intercollegiate activity, a pedagogical endeavor, and an organizing logic of liberalism—is something that everyone can access equally? Even the steps taken to make it accessible carry risk. I have demonstrated, for instance, that generating an auditory shield that affords students a private space in which to learn to argue creates other problems. The issues with how sound is raced did not start with competitive debate, and will not end there. There are countless stories of unarmed Black people being murdered for improper tone, volume, or even just sitting in silence.

However, rather than concluding that the auditory shield is an inadequate defense mechanism from public interference, future research should extend the concept by comparing it with static, material structures where deliberative discussion typically takes place. I believe such analysis will affirm the importance of auditory privacy for pedagogical interactions, and show the value of minimizing students’ fear of social or political influence. Auditory privacy enables educational spaces to serve their ideal purpose, functioning as a special territory for study, growth, and shared experience through a give-and-take, and culminating in effective moral training. Without an auditory shield, the line between educational spaces and public life becomes blurred, enabling the social and political predispositions of the public ear to encroach upon pedagogical interactions. Although an auditory shield may not protect students from outside forces that dictate how learning environments are funded or who is assigned to maintain them, the sonorous qualities of educational spaces impact whether and how intimate sharing of knowledge and values among members is circulated within and beyond those spaces.

As I have indicated, there are many other ways to create auditory shields from sound’s force, form, and flow. While I focused on one kind of auditory shield that invited listeners to use an audible technique to discern the content, there could be several different ways to invent auditory privacy. Future research should focus on the sonic strategies around the creation of these alternative modalities. While this essay focused on the pedagogical benefit, I can imagine the auditory shield serving other purposes in multiple contexts.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the Guest Editors and reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions; Deven Cooper for advice on the manuscript and information on Towson University’s debate program; and Justin Eckstein for outstanding work on the intersection between argumentation, pedagogy, and sound.

Notes

1 Richard Lake, “UNLV Wages War of Words,” Las Vegas Review Journal, September 28, 2008, https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/unlv-wages-war-of-words/.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Michael Horowitz, “Debating Debate Club,” Slate, August 19, 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2264222/entry/2264234/; Charles Hulme and Susie Mackenzie, Working Memory and Severe Learning Difficulties (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992); Esther Janse, “Word Perception in Fast Speech: Artificially Time-Compressed vs. Naturally Produced Fast Speech,” Speech Communication 42, no. 2 (2004): 155–73; Elizabeth L. Stine, Arthur Wingfield, and Leonard Poon, “How Much and How Fast: Rapid Processing of Spoken Language in Later Adulthood,” Psychology and Aging 1, no. 4 (1996): 303–11; PT Staff, “The Talking Cure,” Psychology Today, September 1992, https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/articles/199209/the-talking-cure?amp.

5 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).

6 Justin Eckstein, “The Acoustics of Argumentation and Advocacy,” Argumentation and Advocacy 54, no. 4 (2018): 261.

7 I am gesturing towards Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s concept of the “listening ear” in The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). I recognize that the synecdoche of the ear for all listening is limited in the ways audition occurs.

8 Chris McRae and Keith Nainby, “Engagement Beyond Interruption: A Performative Perspective on Listening and Ethics,” Educational Studies 51, no. 2 (2015): 169.

9 Ibid., 169.

10 Gordon R. Mitchell “Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 1 (2010): 95–120.

11 Justin Eckstein, “Sound Arguments,” Argumentation and Advocacy 53, no. 3 (2017): 167.

12 Alex Pentland with Tracy Heibeck, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

13 Amanda Nell Edgar, Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019), 9.

14 Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 7.

15 Ibid., 2.

16 Eckstein, “Designing Soundscapes for Argumentation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 51, no. 3 (2018): 269–92.

17 Rosa A. Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

18 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 24.

19 Ibid.

20 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1927), 13.

21 Ibid., 14.

22 Ibid., 13–16.

23 Ibid., 15.

24 Dewey, Democracy and Education, 288.

25 Ibid., 416.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 288.

28 Eckstein, “The Acoustics of Argumentation and Advocacy,” 261.

29 For example, consider the metal band Myrkur. One must have a particularly attuned ear to understand it, the tempo is so fast that some may not consider it music at all, and it has such a force that it is painful for some to listen to.

30 G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 48, no. 4 (2012): 201–202.

31 William Southworth and Kent R. Colbert, “The Editor’s Corner,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 18, no. 1 (1981): 75.

32 Kent R. Colbert, “A Quantitative Analysis of CEDA Speaking Rates,” The National Forensic Journal 6, no. 2 (1988): 113–20.

33 Joshua Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 14.

34 Michael Eisenstadt, “UNLV vs Team A—American Style Policy Debate,” YouTube, August 25, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVkpadVONNc&feature=youtu.be.

35 Lake, “UNLV Wages War of Words.”

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Paul Takahashi, “UNLV Finally Hits the Top 10; Its Debate Team Is Nationally Ranked,” Las Vegas Sun, February 4, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/feb/04/unlv-finally-hits-top-10-debate-team-nationally-ra/.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Brian Greenspun, “There’s No Debate about UNLV’s Success,” Las Vegas Sun, May 20, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/may/20/theres-no-debate-about-unlvs-success/.

43 Ibid.

44 Brittney Cooper, “‘I Was Hurt’: How White Elite Racism Invaded a College Debate Championship,” Salon, May 13, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/05/13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9D_how_white_elite_racism_invaded_a_college_debate_championship/.

45 Ibid.

46 Pete Papaherakles, “Making a Mockery of Western Education,” American Free Press, June 7, 2014, https://americanfreepress.net/making-a-mockery-of-western-education/?print=print.

47 Elspeth Reeve, “Was It Racist for Palin to Accuse Obama of ‘Shuck and Jive’?” The Atlantic, October 24, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/was-it-racist-palin-accuse-obama-shucking-and-jiving/322151/.

48 Papaherakles, “Making a Mockery of Western Education.”

49 Ibid.

50 Rod Dreher, “How to Speak Gibberish & Win a National Debate Title,” The American Conservative, May 10, 2014, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/how-to-speak-gibberish-win-a-national-debate-title/.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Dominic Lynch, “Black Students Rewarded for Subversion,” The College Fix, May 14, 2014, https://www.thecollegefix.com/Black-students-rewarded-for-subversion/.

56 Dena Hassouneh, “Reframing the Diversity Question: Challenging Eurocentric Power Hierarchies in Nursing Education,” Journal of Nursing Education 47, no. 7 (2008): 291.

57 Ibid.

58 Sonia Meerai, Idil Abdillahi, and Jennifer Poole, “An Introduction to Anti-Black Sanism,” Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice 5, no. 3 (2016): 24.

59 David Wellman, “From Evil to Illness: Medicalizing Racism,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 70, no. 1 (2000): 29.

60 Deven Cooper, personal correspondence with author, February 2020.

61 The Scrapbook, “Decline of Debate,” Washington Examiner, April 22, 2013, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/decline-of-debate.

62 Ibid.

63 Chase Stephens, “Debater at Harvard Says White People Should Kill Themselves Because of Their White Privilege,” Daily Wire, March 17, 2016, https://www.dailywire.com/news/4180/debater-harvard-says-white-people-should-kill-chase-stephens.

64 Lauren Cooley, “Black Lives Matter Activist Calls for White Genocide,” LifeZette, March 23, 2016, https://www.lifezette.com/2016/03/Black-lives-matter-activist-calls-for-white-genocide/.

65 Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizens,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 120.

66 Jessica Kraft, “Hacking Traditional College Debate’s White-Privilege Problem,” The Atlantic, April 16, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/traditional-college-debate-white-privilege/360746/.

67 Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 654.

68 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano et al., “Rhetoric’s ‘Distinguished’ Pitfalls: A Plática,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 503.

69 Ibid.