On June 18, 2018, Pro Pub­lica released a soul-wrench­ing 8-minute audio record­ing of Cen­tral Amer­i­can chil­dren keen­ing for their par­ents in one of the U.S. Government’s newly-erected border intern­ment camps in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. Attained via civil rights attor­ney Jen­nifer Har­bury, the record­ing came from an anony­mous client who, Har­bury said, ​“heard the children’s weep­ing and crying, and was dev­as­tated by it and had to act.” Now cir­cu­lat­ing widely on the Inter­net, the audio calls upon us to do the same.

With­out a hint of hyper­bole, this audio is utterly dev­as­tat­ing. Except to the unnamed Border Patrol agent who cal­lously remarks in Span­ish to the crying chil­dren: ​“Bueno, aqui ten­emos una orqueta… lo que falta es un con­duc­tor” (“Well, here we have an orchestra…what is miss­ing is the con­duc­tor”). Over gasps and sobs he then shouts an abrupt, frus­trated ​“No llores!” (Don’t Cry!”). These remarks — both deliv­ery and con­tent — reveals the active, oppres­sive pres­ence of a long his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between race, gender, power, and white lis­ten­ing in the U.S., a socially-con­structed but mate­ri­ally-rein­forced aural border between white people and all ​“Others,” what I call the sonic colour line.

The sonic colour line is the learned cul­tural mech­a­nism that estab­lishes racial dif­fer­ence through lis­ten­ing habits and uses sound to com­mu­ni­cate one’s posi­tion vìs-a-vìs white cit­i­zen­ship. When the patroller taunts the chil­dren, he son­i­cally per­forms the hier­ar­chi­cal border between white male U.S. cit­i­zen and brown ​“ille­gal” migrant. It’s no small thing that he chooses their native lan­guage to com­mu­ni­cate their small­ness; he could so easily use it to com­fort them instead. Rather he speaks as an annoyed patri­arch, insin­u­at­ing the chil­dren cry about some­thing small, like a scuffed knee. His teas­ing voice triv­i­al­ises the children’s mas­sive loss and the dire­ness of our vast human­i­tar­ian crisis while eras­ing his own cul­pa­bil­ity, refram­ing their cries as the prob­lem, not his actions and the state author­ity autho­ris­ing them.

JEN­NIFER STO­EVER is an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at SUNY Bing­ham­ton, where she teaches courses on African Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, sound stud­ies, and race and gender rep­re­sen­ta­tion in pop­u­lar music. She also is the project coor­di­na­tor for the Bing­ham­ton His­tor­i­cal Sound­walk Project, a multi-year archival, civi­cally-engaged art project designed to chal­lenge how Bing­ham­ton stu­dents and year-round res­i­dents hear their town, them­selves, and each other. She is Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief for Sound­ing Out!: The Sound Stud­ies Blog and her book The Sonic Colour Line: Race and the Cul­tural Pol­i­tics of Lis­ten­ing was pub­lished by New York Uni­ver­sity Press in 2016.