By Kristen Wallace
Originally published October 28, 2022
Voice is not a gift. It is a democratic right. It is a human right.
-Donaldo Macedo, Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
I am currently obsessed with gifts. In part, this obsession stems from my current thesis work on pedagogy and gift giving and my interest in the amorphous qualities of gift language. As I read Donaldo Macedo’s introduction, I was struck by the declaration he makes based on Freire’s larger text. This declaration calls us to distinguish between what we might give and what is even possible to give. Voice is not something that can be given, and no “false benevolence” to give voice can obscure the institutional mechanisms that first impose voicelessness. Assuming voice can be given elides the reasons why it would need to be given at all.
Freire and Macedo do not interrogate their use of the word gift, but in context they allude to this top-down dissemination of resources. For them, gifts are deeply connected to hierarchy. A pedagogical gift is a power play. The receiver is meant only to accept, not participate in the gift. So, if voice is not a gift, then what does it mean for it to be a right — especially in the context of education and writing center work? OED tells us that a right is a “legal, moral, or natural entitlement;” further, it is “legal entitlement or justifiable claim (on legal or moral grounds) to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way; the advantage or profit deriving from this.”
Natural entitlement is, of course, the most fitting definition. While the relationship between voice, speech, mouth, and body is undeniable, in all forms (written, verbal, gestural, etc.) our voices are a part of us — natural to us. However, Macedo’s conversation about how some educators seek to give voice and the institutional suppression of voice hints at a societal understanding of voice as something closer to a legal or moral entitlement — something that is framed as a gift because it can be — or has been — commodified. This is not to say that Macedo is wrong, only that voice seems to be as much a construct of our cultural imaginings as it is an inherent part of us.
The distinction between gift and right is muddier if we attend to the legal definition of right, especially with its connection to profit or advantage. To give a gift, in Freire’s and Macedo’s sense, is, ostensibly, to confer an advantage on someone else. A teacher claiming to give voice to the voiceless speaks as though rights and gifts are one and the same — the teacher grants the right of voice to a student which then serves to enfranchise that student. The commodification of rights as something that must be given or restored (I’m thinking here about imperial democratic projects that justify military force by using the language of rights restoration) reinforces its connection to gift.
The 1972 resolution (adopted in 1974) by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) offers rights language truer to Macedo’s and Freire’s conception. CCCC pushes against the supremacy of Edited American English and advocates for students to be able to use the dialects “of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.” Voice is something students enter the classroom with that is natural to them, but this does not mean that their voice is the one sanctioned by the institutions. CCCC’s statement asks us to reconsider the ways that educational processes can, by limiting dialects and promoting assimilatory strategies in the classroom, force students into voicelessness and the ways that the language of rights can affirm the a priori existence of voice for those who would be subject to that erasure.
Though CCCC’s statement helpfully operationalizes the language of right, Freire offers yet another way to think about voice, one that seems to get at the project we’ve undertaken with Center Action. He talks about humanization as a vocation. “[This vocation] is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.” Humanization — becoming fully human — is our vocation. It is our calling. Our duty. Thus, our voices and the capacity and agency to use them are not just a right, not just a gift, but something much greater. They are fundamental to the action we must take.
As we struggle to set the wheels in motion for our blog and podcast and as we work to articulate our goals and generate deliverables, I have been prompting myself to keep the why at the forefront of this work. This medium is not a gift to our guests and contributors, or to ourselves. Center Action is just one part of our shared duty — all of our shared duty — to act with humanization as our priority.