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.

摘要

听觉隐私是一种分布不均的资源。不平等地使用听觉屏障，这种做法将公众排除在教育场所之外，以允许人们进行信念和信仰的实验，这提醒人们声音在竞赛。对美国式大学间政策辩论的这种分析特别关注了媒体使用的各种形容词来形容自我认同的白人辩论者和黑人辩论者“传播”的声音，这种技术使演讲者在辩论中提供尽可能多的论点。给定时间限制，并以此产生听觉障碍。虽然这项研究发现所有参与者通常都可以进入辩论的实验空间，传播产生的多余声音促使评论员称赞白人辩论者的严谨，同时将黑人辩论者的特征描述为不足。他们的评估仅根据声音的发音而消除了黑人的声音，但沿着詹妮弗·林恩·斯托弗（Jennifer Lynn Stoever）所说的“音色线”。这些反应说明了在教学空间中学生练习对话和思考的不平等现象。