“Their accent is just too much”: Tracing the sonic color line in public radio production

Linguistic ideologies in society shape what voices can and cannot pass as professional, trustworthy, or authoritative in public discourse. Often, these ideologies are raciolinguistic: in other words, the ways we talk about language may support the construction and maintenance of racial hierarchies in society. How does this process manifest in the public radio industry? In this talk, I analyze how voices are evaluated as (in)appropriate for broadcast in public radio stories. The talk will focus on two main points in the production process that disproportionately exclude voices marked as nonwhite: in sourcing stories and in voicing stories. These evaluations place a burden on public radio employees of color that seek to deviate from these exclusionary standards. Tracing this industry’s production process reveals the sonic color line at work in evaluating voices as (in)appropriate for the airwaves.