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On January 12, 2010, Berin Szoka, a blogger for the Technology Liberation Front—a libertarian media commentary site advocating against Internet regulation—posted a satirical report titled “We Must End the (Reverse) Digital Divide!” The occasion for the post was the recent release of statistics by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project showing that African Americans and Latinos had surpassed white Americans in wireless Internet use. Szoka, a Senior Fellow at the market-oriented Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) and director of its Center for Internet Freedom, ended his brief recapitulation of the Pew report’s observations as follows: “Congress must act to correct this clear racial travesty. . . . Only then will digital Racial Justice be achieved for all Americans.”1 While the post’s subtext is that left-liberal petitions on behalf of goals such as “Racial Justice” are pointless, even dangerous exercises—requests for government intervention obviated by the guiding hand of the all-wise market—it points, perhaps unwittingly, to a transformation in understandings of black America in the age of Obama. For while racial justice certainly continues not to be served, a certain “normalization” in whites’ perception of African Americans, in part a cumulative effect of the expansion of the black middle class and a product of the “post-Soul” era, can be attributed to the transformation of material conditions in black life that extend beyond the election of a black president.2 Indeed, the far right’s complaints of (reverse) racism, with the rhetoric of which Szoka’s post flirts, seems largely to be a minority, if certainly disturbing reaction partly stemming from the statistical fact of the declining white majority in the American populace.3 One element of that broader set of material transformations in black life is technological, but Szoka’s post only points to it obliquely. Particularly , mobile telephony appears to have assumed a significant role in black society, crossing the class division between the black middle class and the black working class and transforming African Americans into a 9 What’s in a Name? Race and the Ringtone’s Revival in (Un-)Popular Music 242 Chapter 9 lucrative market of mobile consumers. The cell phone ringtone plays a prominent role in this story, resulting in the ringtone’s “racialization” in the United States—and with popular music as the primary terrain of the transformation. Popular Music and Black (Telephonic) Modernity The study of ringtones and their racialization can, in part, be understood as an addendum to an important argument made by Alexander Weheliye. He argues that the notion of “the ‘digital divide,’ while surely drawing much needed attention to certain politico-economic inequalities, cannot but reinforce the idea that Afro-diasporic populations are inherently Luddite and therefore situated outside the bounds of Western modernity.”4 Yet such assumptions patently ignore the ways in which these populations engage with the technological, for example through the domain of popular music. According to Weheliye, “popular music offers one of the most fertile grounds for the dissemination and enculturation of digital and analog technologies and has done so at least since the invention of the phonograph at the close of the nineteenth century. Pop music also represents the arena in which black subjects have culturally engaged with these technoinformational flows, so that any consideration of digital space might do well to include the sonic in order to comprehend different modalities of digitalness, but also to not endlessly circulate and therefore solidify the presumed ‘digital divide’ with all its attendant baggage.”5 Consider the work by Eszter Hargittai and other sociologists on a “second-level digital divide” produced by the variable acquisition of skills, in contrast to a divide based on technological access. It may reinforce racialized conceptions of technological access—surely class and education are the primary markers of such asymmetries, rather than race—and yet also speak, if obliquely, to aspects of present social reality—precisely, in part, on account of the racialized asymmetries of class and educational access.6 These two arguments operate at different, seemingly incompatible registers—one on the plane of cultural theory, the other of empirical sociology—but something of a sublation of the two can be effected. For a host of complex reasons involving differential access to mobile and digital technologies, working-class African Americans have engaged with them in ways both under-recognized and articulating cultural/musical habits of everyday life with the production of new modes of consumption. Specifically , as working-class African Americans gained access...

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