Tuning the Black Voice: Colour-Deafness and the American Negro Theatre’s Radio Dramas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In September 1945, the New York radio station WNEW engaged Harlem’s celebrated American Negro Theatre (ANT) to perform a series of weekly radio plays, beginning with Arthur Laurents’s drama The Face. It was an anomalous venture in US radio, which rarely broadcast black voices. In order to avoid controversy, WNEW attempted to regulate the political significance of the series by advertising it using language couched in the modern rhetoric of colour-blind casting. However, despite these limitations applied to their efforts, the ANT infused their performances with an unexpected challenge to the racial status quo in the country. Defying stereotypes of black aurality, they subverted expectations of how African Americans were supposed to sound. They did so by destabilizing the essentialist concept of the “black voice” and exploiting the disembodied medium of radio. This article reinstates this undervalued moment in both theatre and radio history by examining The Face in detail and considering how race functions on the radio.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".