In addition to the dismissive canard that “cities are noisy” — and therefore residents shouldn’t do anything to make them quieter — the other recurrent (but much less frequent) shibboleth we hear from noise denialists is that reducing excessive and unhealthy noise is somehow “racist.”
The only thing this deflective assertion reveals is the desperation of the people who make it, because it implies that 1) only certain “races” make noise,1 and 2) the person saying it has identified them — both of which are far more racist than the need to lower unhealthy sound levels.
Given that hundreds of millions of people around the world are exposed to excessive noise — prompting other people in those countries to try to reduce it — there’s simply no factual or even rational basis for denialist claims that only some racial groups make noise, and thus that efforts to address it are inherently “racist”.
Even if such remarks are restricted to the U.S. — which comprises a panoply of ethnic and racial groups — there is excessive noise all over the country, irrespective of how diverse or homogeneous any given community is. The simple fact is that all humans are capable of generating unhealthy noise. The issue isn’t who is making noise, but how to reduce it for everyone’s well-being.
Equally fallacious is the notion that Providence residents awakened in the middle of the night by a vehicle with a modified muffler could possibly know the race of its owner — or why that would even matter to them, unless we’re supposed to believe they would somehow be less sleep-deprived and exasperated if the owner is a member of group X, but not if they belong to group Y. Seriously?
Moreover, this line of thinking further requires us to believe that only members of specific racial groups — and no one else — ever installs modified mufflers on their vehicles, or sets off fireworks, uses over-amplified stereos, etc. All of which are easily disproven by sales data for such products around the U.S. (and all over the world).
In reality, only a small subset of any group intentionally generates excessive noise, and broad sectarian claims to the contrary are simply an effort to deflect attention away from the real issue, which is the public health effects it has on the vast majority of residents who do not do so — in the same way that smokers and their apologists asserted a non-existent “right” to expose everyone else to carcinogens, rather than address their effect on others.
But as with smoking, long-term scientific research shows that everyone needs to limit their exposure to excessive noise, and one’s race / ethnicity / cultural identity cannot and does not change that. And just like Big Tobacco’s historical efforts to deny that cigarette smoke is bad for everyone’s health, pretending that exposing other people to unhealthy noise is some sort of sectarian entitlement — and thus that seeking to reduce it is racist — is simply a pathetic attempt to deny the truth.
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1 The very idea of so-called “race” itself is a purely social construct, and doesn’t actually exist as a function of human physiology — i.e., there is no objective biological determination of whether a person is part of one race or another.