In this essay, I ask what it means to listen to women narrate the spectacle of black death. I position contemporary videos, their voices and sounds, within the long history of black women’s testimony in the United States. In listening, the essay calls for an ethics of recognition rather than identification.

Thank you to Sounding Out! and editor-in-chief Jennifer Stoever (author of The Sonic Color Line, NYU Press 2016) for providing a capacious forum.