Anthropology The Thrill Of Endless Noise

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Expectations Of Politeness And Basic Consideration

June 17, 2024 by David 156 Comments

Lifted from the comments – which you’re reading, of course – an item deserving of a little more attention.

The Atlantic is currently promoting an article from its archive, one selected by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. A choice that is perhaps more telling than intended.

The chosen article, by novelist Xochitl Gonzalez, poses the question, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” It is sub-headed, “The sound of gentrification is silence.” A racially judgemental tone prevails. Such that the term rich people can be read as meaning white people. Followed by implied tutting.

It begins with an account of life at university – Brown, since you ask – and the merits of Brooklyn hip hop combos:

I first arrived on campus for the minority-student orientation. The welcome event had the feel of a block party, Blahzay Blahzay blasting on a boom box. (It was the ’90s.) We spent those first few nights convening in one another’s rooms, gossiping and dancing until late. We were learning to find some comfort in this new place, and with one another. 

Ah, those downtrodden minority students, huddled together for mutual safety. Lest the roaming tigers find them.

Then the other students arrived — the white students.

As I said, the tutting is implied.

And then, belatedly, the realisation that attempts at intellectual activity – say, at an upscale university – tend to require a certain restraint, noise-wise:

I just hadn’t counted on everything that followed being so quiet. The hush crept up on me at first. I would be hanging out with my friends from orientation when one of our new roommates would start ostentatiously readying themselves for bed at a surprisingly early hour. Hints would be taken, eyes would be rolled, and we’d call it a night. 

Morning lectures being an inconceivable thing, it seems.

Ms Gonzalez, who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is, also tells us how she, “just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.” Say, when being a late-night annoyance to roommates and neighbours, a thing that by her own account happens repeatedly, or when playing music in a library. Where other people are trying to study:

One day, when I accidentally sat down to study in the library’s Absolutely Quiet Room, fellow students Shhh-ed me into shame for putting on my Discman… I soon realised that silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were. 

A bold admission. One, I suspect, that reveals more than intended. Also, the claim that one can sit down in a library accidentally.

Ms Gonzalez’ tale of woe continues:

Within a few weeks, the comfort that I and many of my fellow minority students had felt during those early cacophonous days had been eroded, one chastisement at a time. The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. 

Ms Gonzalez, it seems, was being oppressed. Just for being thoughtless and noisy when people are trying to study. Her comfort was being impacted by requests for civility. How very dare they.

As dicentra notes in the comments,

Quiet means you’re studying, and boisterousness means you’re not, and given you’re at a university, which aesthetic ought to win out? 

Well, indeed. One of the many things to have somehow not crossed our author’s mind.

A boisterous conversation would lead to a classmate knocking on the door with a “Please quiet down.” 

Feel her pain. The outrageousness of it all.

I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy. 

Well, yes, It does. You selfish, classless bint.

And note the sly downgrading of an ability to do some actual work as mere comfort. Or an ability to sleep without hearing hip hop once again booming through the wall.

And the Atlantic publishes this – this ode to antisocial selfishness – as if it might leave the reader morally improved. And feeling sympathetic towards the author.

Inevitably, Ms Gonzalez blames her own moral shortcomings on other people’s race and class, as if, by expecting politeness, they were imposing on her in cruel and unusual ways. Because – magic words – “of colour.” But the common variable, the one that’s hard to miss, is the author’s own rudeness and self-absorption. And so, she blunders into the library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” and fires up her music.

Oh, and for those of you curious about the author’s precise level of brownness, and thereby magical qualities, and all those rather handy exemptions from reciprocal proprieties, I’ll just leave this here:

Ms Gonzalez tells us that the “absence of noise” – by which she means, consideration for others – is “at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.” And yet she wonders why other people – less selfish people – might want to get away from her. Away from all the noise. And to live somewhere nicer, somewhere she doesn’t.

Readers may wish to ponder the possibility that noise may often be a pretty good measure of other issues. People who don’t care about stopping their neighbours from studying or sleeping may not care about other things too. Other boundaries. Which in turn may go some way to explaining the existence of those quiet, gentrified neighbourhoods, the ones that so offend Ms Gonzalez.

The expectation of consideration is soon, predictably, via contrivance, framed as a form of racial oppression. A way to torment “Black and brown communities,” in which the ethos is “loud and proud.” Because if residents of respectable neighbourhoods object to their nights being disrupted by endless overdriven sound systems, then this is merely “an elite sonic aesthetic: the systemic elevation of quiet over noise.” And almost certainly racist.

“One person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy,” we’re told. “I take pride in saying that we are a loud people.”

An expression of joy by loud people can be found embedded below:

Note the self-satisfied quip, “They’ll be fine. They can buy a house somewhere else.” Today’s words, by the way, are recreational spite.

At which point, readers may wonder how Ms Gonzalez, a novelist, manages to write her books amid the fashionably vibrant racket that she recommends to others. All that shouting and shrieking and “ceaseless music” that she finds so liberating and authentic. Wouldn’t those extended and rather complicated trains of thought be disrupted, and likely made impossible, by all the shouting and laughing, all the whumping and thumping, all those jolly sirens?

Happily, an answer is provided in the pages of Elle Décor, in which Ms Gonzalez opined some two months earlier:

Writing novels is intrinsically solitary. Which is no small part of why I switched professions in the first place. Despite wearing the coat of an extrovert, I am pure Greta Garbo. I want to be alone.

This point is expanded upon:

The early pandemic found me without a permanent residence and on a deadline. In March, while getting my MFA in Iowa, I’d come home to New York City for a quick visit to celebrate having just sold my first novel. Three months and one case of COVID-19 later, I was quarantining with my best friend, her husband, and their toddler in their Brooklyn apartment. Before long, the close quarters and endless sounds of sirens made revising my novel there untenable. I decided to head upstate. 

And so, our silence-needing novelist sought out “a gorgeous historic house in downtown Kingston, New York.” Ah, yes. An “upstate vacation rental.”

Perhaps Ms Gonzalez was hoping that readers of her Atlantic article – the one about noise being so vibrant and racially affirming – would not stumble across her Elle Décor piece, published weeks earlier, which rather calls into question her own later claims. And which, it has to be said, suggests a certain pretence, a certain hypocrisy.

In short, then, your desire for peace and quiet is terribly problematic, and probably racist. While hers, not so much. Which is enormously convenient. If not entirely convincing.

 

Previously in the Atlantic:

A woman oppressed by crumbs.

And another expensively educated Brooklynite who insists that crossword puzzles are “one of the systemic forces that threaten women.”

And then there was the attempt to convince us that chronic thievery is totally fine and nothing to complain about, provided it’s being done to someone else. Someone who isn’t an Atlantic contributor, presumably.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the Atlantic referred to Elon Musk as, and I quote, “a far-right activist.”

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