How do protests give voice to the oppressed?

Protests provide a unique opportunity for visibility to those who are systemically marginalised. Racial, national, gender, and sexual minorities in the U.S. often make themselves heard through protest movements. Examples include ACT UP’s struggle against the AIDS crisis, women’s protests like SlutWalk and Take Back the Night, student encampments for Palestinian rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement. But what exactly does it mean to say that protests are an opportunity for visibility? In what sense do protests “give voice” to the voiceless?

First, let’s examine how it is possible to lack a voice. Social minorities often face barriers to democratic participation that dominant groups do not. Black Americans, for example, are often prevented from exercising free speech through forces like voter suppression and mass incarceration. Yet the sense in which protesting minorities are voiceless seems to go beyond political exclusion – it extends to a deeper, epistemic exclusion.

Several philosophical concepts help capture this idea. I mention two here:

Hermeneutical injustice: Philosopher Miranda Fricker describes hermeneutical injustice as the unfair disadvantage some groups face in shaping the concepts that we use to understand the social world. Without these concepts, groups can struggle to make sense of their own experiences. For example: before the term sexual harassment was coined, women were forced to interpret their anxiety over unwelcome attention as an inability to take a “joke” or a “compliment”, rather than recognising as an objective wrong.
Arrogant perception: Members of dominant social groups tend to see the world through their own desires and interests. Marilyn Frye describes this tendency: “[the arrogant perceiver] manipulates the environment, perception, and judgement of her whom he perceives… when that fails he can only conclude that she is defective: unnatural, flawed, broken, abnormal, damaged, sick”.

Each of these notions captures a similar insight: the conceptual resources and affective frameworks that guide our view of the world are designed to suit the interests of a dominant social group. The oppressed are voiceless in the sense that systemic forces prevent them from speaking and being understood on their own terms.

How do protests enable marginalised groups to be heard despite this deep voicelessness? One answer to this question is that protests inaugurate the possibility of a joint voice even if those protesting do not yet have one. On José Medina’s powerful account of protest, it serves as a space for epistemic and communicative discovery. When members of marginalised groups assemble together in dissent, they constitute themselves as a protesting public, and they begin to exercise a collective agency that they previously lacked. Protests allow the voiceless to “[show] the community and the world that they are part of society, that public life is also theirs, and that their voices and perspectives have to be taken into account”. Assembling in protest is powerful because it is a non-verbal act: it allows protestors to constitute themselves as resisting oppression even if forces like hermeneutical injustice prevent them from fully recognising or articulating their experiences of oppression.

Another way to see protest is as allowing marginalised groups to use a unified voice – not just as creating a space where they can discover one together. Protestors often have enough communicative power to push their audience towards specific transformative aims, even if they lack the ability to articulate these aims on their own terms. For example, ACT UP’s protests in the 1980s and 1990s leveraged the emotional and cultural significance of American institutions to speak a clear message. By scattering the ashes of the dead on the White House lawn and staging “die-ins” at churches and federal buildings, activists drew attention to the U.S. government's inaction on the AIDS crisis. Turning death into a striking, symbolic display in places central to American society allowed the activists to communicate a clear message. They made the homophobic patterns of coordination in the U.S. blatant to those who looked upon them.

Activists seem to recognise that ingrained injustice functions in part through its emotional power. Forces like arrogant perception make us feel positive emotions towards existing social practices and negative emotions towards our own transgressive behaviours or the transgressive behaviours of others. Yet these forces do not have perfect control over our affective states. They cannot entirely prevent, for instance, feelings of latent anger when we are the subjects of oppression, feelings of sorrow when we encounter the suffering of others, or feelings of pride and belonging when we connect with others from a minority community.

Public displays of death are a mechanism to direct their audience’s emotional attachments. As sociologist Deborah Gould insightfully argues, dominant ideologies and transformative social movements like ACT UP both attempt to “make sense” of our affective states – to authorise some feelings, but invalidate others. We have unspoken emotional ties to grand buildings that we take to represent our collective values, and we experience great fear and sorrow when we see symbols of death around these structures. ACT UP activists voiced their vision for change by sparking these strong emotions in their audience. Even though they occupied a world structured by heterosexual interests, they were able to communicate their transformative aims by speaking through socially significant objects and spaces.

So, there are two different ways in which protests give voice to the oppressed. They provide a space for members of marginalised groups to gather together and demand public attention. They are also a means for marginalised groups to speak in a unified voice when they lack the conceptual resources to articulate injustice verbally. By leveraging the social significance of objects and spaces, protesters can redirect their audience’s emotional attachments to guide them down a specific path of social change.