The Black Automaton Repsonse

In Douglas Kearney’s text, the Black Automaton, there is a clear relevance of the title to the poems within. In analysis of the title, it would seem that the title is referring to the manner in which African Americans prior to the civil rights movement were viewed as: automatons. They weren’t viewed as real people, just meat machines walking the streets alongside you. In the poem Radio, this worldview comes crashing down when the world is exposed to African American use of the radio. This is evident in the very first line of the poem:

“the first black you met was on the radio.

this is true even if you lived with blacks.”

With the use of the radio, blacks became more than mere automatons. And they became a real threat to a white dominated society, hence the comparisons between blood and the radio, which would catalyze race riots and increased civil rights movements.

The word radio also doesn’t have to be taken literally, as it could mean mass communication among blacks as a whole. “the first blacks to realize they were blacks became radios”. This line could be interpreted as that African Americans didn’t understand their status of being oppressed and how they could move beyond it until they organized together as a whole, with mass communication and so forth. This is why there is the word “blacks” in standard font and the word “blacks” in italics; it is representative of their chance from automaton to a “real person”, and they became real people when the rest of society acknowledged their presence by way of mass communications and mass movements.

This poem could also be representative of how jazz was able to influence the civil rights movement. The lines of that poem that read, “singing something that could never be English” and “the snow filling its voice” have musical connotations. It would make sense that the first instance for African Americans to gain a foothold on the radio scene would be through jazz music, which was popular at the time.

“the first black to speak the word radio

knew it meant the same as blood.”

This line suggests that jazz music was simply a method for blacks to incite a reaction in the oppressed populous. The line, “claimed radio meant love, to better lure you” suggests that Jazz music was a deceptive method to assert African American equality and the civil rights movement. The "blacks" were said "not to speak English: even if they did radios cannot speak", which further distances the African American race from this racist narrator, as they do not speak the same language, and continues the theme of the deceptive nature of blacks: their music was incomprehensible to people like the narrator and was used a method to covertly inform and inspire blacks as a whole. Jazz music would appear to symbolize “love” and other emotions, but in reality was a method to inspire the rest of the African American race to act upon their oppressors.