Voices Carry: The Spoken Ways That We Can Effect Change

Commentary and opinion from Contributing Author Chuck Small

The choice is not whether – but how to use our voices.

What happens when your nation morphs into something you don’t recognize?

For me, I feel I have to protest.

I realize my privilege as a middle-class, 60+ white male provides a degree of safety that other protesters don’t have. But it’s precisely because I have that privilege that I feel a responsibility to get out and lend my voice to those who are at far greater risk and yet still do so.

Especially since, these days, their doing so is putting them at risk of illegal deportation devoid of due process.

On Holy Saturday, I joined Raleigh, N.C.’s part of the Reddit initiated “50501” movement:

A campaign that stands for “50 protests in 50 states on 1 day.”

But I’m sure it was a misnomer: Local television was reporting protests in 20 cities and towns – just within North Carolina.

All week, I’d been thinking about the irony of an increasingly aggressive strain of Christian nationalism missing the point of Holy Week.

How the man whose crucifixion they commemorate died at the hands of the state, following a sham trial.

That “trial” is more than what people are receiving these days in the United States.

I knew I had to witness to their stories. Under the headline “Silenced by the State,” I created a sign that surrounded Signorelli’s Crucifixion with Saint Mary Magdalene with pictures from the news of the past three months:

• The apprehension on the street of a Boston suburb of 30-year-old Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk.

She was sent to a Louisiana detention center. Her lawyers said it was retaliation for an op-ed criticizing the war in Gaza.

• A picture of Kilmar Abrego García:

The Maryland resident the U.S. mistakenly and illegally sent to an El Salvador prison and then claimed it could not intervene to retrieve.

• An unidentified man from India:

Taken from a Durham, N.C., home during a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

• Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil:

Two Columbia University students arrested by ICE; both linked to 2024 protests of the war in Gaza.-

• A New York Times portrait of the wife of Arturo Suárez Trejo, a 33-year-old musician. He arrived February 8 at a house in Raleigh to record a music video.

• ICE agents arrived and took him. Within a month, he was sent an El Salvador prison.

In several of these cases, judges are telling the government it can’t just administer punishment without due process.

The Trump administration’s argument boils down to “The end justifies the means.” Often, its response is meaner and uglier.

Not at all Christ-like, for anyone who claims to be both an American and a follower of his.

More than a thousand people rallied behind our General Assembly complex. I took out my phone, thinking I’d capture various signs for a photo essay.

Something inside told me to put my phone away.

I realized my role wasn’t to chronicle the event.

For decades, I had to be careful about using my voice to protest, lest I compromise my reputation and that of my newsroom. A decade and a half after leaving daily newspapering, taking pictures of the protest felt like putting on a set of shoes that no longer fit.

Instead, I raised my own sign and joined in the chant:

“The people united will never be defeated.”

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