It’s Time to Stop Silencing Black Voices

Have you ever lost your voice? Had your vocal cords seize up so completely that you were afraid you would never again be able to vocalise your thoughts?

It’s a terrifying feeling. It doesn’t happen all at once. You don’t typically wake up one morning without the ability to speak. It often starts with a crack in tone. You clear your throat and try to speak again. You attempt to maintain your levels but something outside of your control is impacting your capacity to deliver.

You try again, this time putting a bit more effort into projecting, but it’s not easily resolvable. Your voice breaks some more. You now know this isn’t a passing thing and you realise that in order to protect yourself from further damage, you’re going to have to stay quiet for a while.

You tell yourself that there are other ways to communicate. You can write, type, draw. But in a world of bellowing voices, writing, typing and drawing only work if you have a captive audience — an audience willing to take your loss of voice into consideration. The world does not stop when you can’t speak, it continues whilst you have to sit it out.

Do-gooders step in with remedies. They want to help. They ‘see the problem’. They’ve ‘been through exactly the same thing’. They tell you what you need and leap into action on your behalf long before you are able to stop them.

You hurriedly draw your needs, but they’ve gone full steam ahead discussing what should be done for you with anyone who will listen, on a mission of saving you.

You hear them telling others that you can’t speak even as you try to communicate, but with every action toward making yourself heard, you lose a little bit more of yourself. You’re running out of paper. The ink is drying up. Your fingers are tired of typing. Your ability to state your case is being lost with each encounter, so you stop. You are now silent. You have been silenced. All you’re left with is the pain of hearing everyone else tell your story in a voice that isn’t yours.

If you’ve ever lost your physical voice, you’ll be able to attest to the fact that it is not a permanent state of being. Your voice returns and the pain of losing it can almost be forgotten. You may miss a meeting or a wedding (as I did once) but overall, the devastation is short-lived because this is a physiological thing, rather than a psychological one. The remedies are often homeopathic rather than systemic.

But if you’ve lost your voice in society, no quick-fix remedies will help. When the cause is racism, sexism or discrimination fueled by unconscious bias, what chance is there of being heard?

These last few weeks, many have realised that the voices of black people, black women in particular, have been lost and in their places, there are bellowing narratives that say our experience of racism and discrimination is not real or that we have taken the removal of our rights in the wrong way. These are the same voices that blame the victim for being murdered when she just wanted to walk home instead of the murderer who greedily took her freedom or who, more recently, implied that Black Lives Matter is not a sensitive issue.

Voices are being lost all over the world, some to never be found again — yet, there are those who think they have a right to replace the missing words with their own. Those who subscribe to the notion that setting boundaries and speaking out is more akin to cultivating drama and attention-seeking, than it is to taking back our power. They fail to understand the bravery it takes to speak up or, the fact that we have to carefully consider each sound that escapes our mouths because every single one impacts our survival.

There is a time to speak on behalf of others, a time to be an ally and a time to just listen. Knowing which is which is a skill that takes empathy, compassion and consideration of other people’s world views and their lived experiences.

Every voice matters and feeds into the bigger picture.

To the perpetual voice-takers, it’s time to stop filling every moment with your narratives and start listening. Make a way for the lost voices to be healed and heard. Stop minimising. Stop over-powering. Stop, stop, stop!

And to those who have been subjected to the suppression of your stories, let’s find a way to heal past the hurt. What we say matters, despite the overwhelming narrative that it doesn’t. There is work to be done. It’s time to find our voices again.