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Alice Goffman's Voices Of The Silent

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Voices of the Silent: How democracies Silence the Oppressed
Governments are set up to serve the people. There are those in which the people are ruled by one single dictator, and those in which the officials are elected by the people to represent them. Governments vary in ideological, economical, and sociological principles. A democracy is a very oppressive form of government. They are supposed to represent the people and give their citizens the power to affect public policy. Democracies sound good on paper which their constitutions are inscribed on. However, there exists people who are oppressed and left without a representative voice. Hidden between the lines of the constitution are the unfair policies of the government that creates communication barriers between the oppressed people and the people who have the voice to make a change.
Slaves in a democracy …show more content…

The truth is, although a majority of the population actually enjoy these “Unalienable Rights”, an oppressed minority is always silenced. Those who attempt to speak for this silenced group, such as Alice Goffman did during her ethnography displayed true courage and sacrifice to the lives of the people on Sixth Street. This essay covered the problems that these oppressed people have in “finding that voice”, and how the policies deny them of this voice. This essay explored how Alice Goffman’s book “On the Run” demonstrate the difficulties of 21st century inner-city residents to speak out against the ongoing oppression. Finally, this essay explained things that create communication barriers between these oppressed people and the powerful audiences. Democracies claim to represent the voice of the people, in order for that to be true, everyone, even the voiceless should be heard. In order for this to happen, those who do have a voice must be willing to sacrifice their voice for the benefit of those without

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The book On the Run by Alice Goffman narrates six years Goffman spent hanging out in a black poor neighborhood of West Philadelphia that she calls 6th Street. During her stay there, she became friends with a group of resident young men, and got to know their surroundings such as girlfriends and family members. This experience in this disadvantaged neighborhood pushed her to write this book where she describes the neighborhood’s conditions, the violence encountered by the police and the residents, and the injustices of the criminal justice system. The book’s primary argument is that the continuous threat of surveillance and continuous investigations that lead to the arrest and imprisonment of young people did great harm to 6th Street, turning many of its residents into

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