Nina Simone: The Ignored, the Silenced Voices of Protest
As a political and public debate, the state of U.S. public education—and all of the Commons—as well as what education reform is needed overlaps and intersects with debates about whose voice matters and what words and tone are acceptable or appropriate.
Powerful and essential discussions about race and racism, about deficit assumptions concerning people in poverty, speak to Arundhati Roy’s “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
Nina Simone’s voice demands that we confront debates about language and tone as they contribute to and detract from political and public struggles with democracy, the Commons, liberation, and the often unnamed plights of racism, sexism, and the persistent culture of violence that defines America: