I’m at a conference, and earlier this morning attended a presentation by Dr. Jennifer Dodge on protest in New York on both sides of the tracking issue. Dr. Dodge cited work by Mansbridge (2012), specifically arguing that “levels of civility may have to go down in order for levels of inclusion to go up.” It got me thinking. Who do we find excuses not to listen to?

My presentation is tomorrow morning, and hits on similar themes. It is research on an organization called Just Listening. Last week, I met with the founder (and my co-author) Sharon Browning, and she told me this story: 

He was rambling, locked in the internal logic of his own fantastic world. After about 10 minutes of this, I am not proud to say that I attended to my own internal monologue of judgment and frustration, and started looking for a space, a pause, some opening to end the conversation and move on.  Suddenly, Martin stopped mid-sentence, maneuvered to look me straight in the eye, and in a calm, focused and completely normal voice said, “You will never know the wisdom I hold.”

What is it about the policy world (and many others) that finds people unworthy to be listened to? 

Over the past few years while studying protest in New Orleans and Camden, I’ve become more and more cynical of arguments that dismiss voices based on the tenor of their critique. Too often, we call voices “unreasonable” or “rabble-rousers” or “enemies of free-speech” like we saw in the AEI Cami Anderson incident last week. There are some deeply problematic aspects of such an approach. It ignores that the historical context that “if [people] do not believe they are being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their volume until they believe they are being heard.” Volume and being disempowered are linked, and disenfranchisement is only made worse when those same voices are critiqued for being loud. So be quiet and be ignored, or be loud and be ostracized.

In a similar vein, I’ve been showing more and more of these protest videos in my classes, and finding that the way they are perceived is extremely dependent on a cultural lens. Those less familiar with minority and urban communities see loud, minority voices as threatening. Those who grew up in these communities are much more familiar with the cadence and nature of complaints (they often share a lot of rhythm and rhetorical techniques with gospel-style preaching), and interpret them as standing up to power rather than threatening individuals. 

Which brings me back to Dr. Dodge’s presentation. In her Q&A, someone asked about civility, and she commented that calls for civility are often strategic calls to silence opposition. They are designed to further disempower groups coming from different cultural backgrounds by discrediting the way they make their case. 

That has to stop. As Mansbridge argues, in order to truly focus on inclusion, we need to loosen our demands for civility. Cultural differences and rhetorical strategies are not reasons to exclude. Criticizing minority voices for rhetorical styles developed in response to systematic disenfranchisement is another ugly form of control. 

When we hear disenfranchised voices crying out in the wilderness, let’s stop criticizing them for crying too loud, and start asking why they are crying.