Listening like White Nationalists at a Civil Rights Rally
(2017)
author(s): Bryce Peake
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This soundscape and accompanying essay explore the listened-to world of white nationalists protesting a 2015 civil rights rally in the United States. Marked by countless instances of police brutality and a racially motivated mass shooting, the autumn months of 2015 echoed with the rallying cries of Black Lives Matter… cries that stoked white nationalists’ nascent conspiracy theories about white genocide and an impending “race war” between black Islam and white Christendom. Both the new Civil Rights movement and these white nationalist fears came to a head at the Justice or Else Rally in October 2015. This essay explores the acoustemological – acoustic and epistemological – world of white nationalists protesting Justice or Else, using the nexus of creativity and empiricism to understand a white nationalist standpoint acoustemology proliferating in Donald Trump’s United States.