The Right to Listen

A listener, when she realizes that she struggles to attend to only certain kinds of voices, apprehends the divisions in society. How we hear someone relates to that person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, age, physical ability, and wealth.

Attempting to create what the essayist Rebecca Solnit calls “a democracy of equal audibility” is a social enterprise— it’s one of the tasks of feminist, antiracist, and economic justice movements. What would such a democracy sound like? Certainly not like one booming bass note.