Neighbor, A Handbook: Part 2(j), The Terms-Marginalized
“It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you’re not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.” ― Kate Bornstein
Understanding this word is critical to being a Neighbor.
A visual definition
A margin is an edge. Imagine a page in a book. In the center of the page are the words. The words take up the important space, hold the power of the book, and deliver the message. Around all four edges of the page are the margins — the blank space that’s created to hold the words. The role of the margin is to invisible create a frame for the words so they look their best and are most effective.
Definition
Someone who’s marginalized has less, and sometimes no, social power. This can be due to actual laws. It can also be due to social frameworks that keep the person in place. Marginalization can happen in one, several, or all, of the following ways:
The person or group is
- socially excluded (by the society in which they live)
- discriminated against because of who they are or how they’re made
- stereotyped as being of less value or worthy of less respect
- treated as less important and given less (or no) social, economic, political, etc., power or opportunity.
Marginalization happens in politics, health care, education, the legal system, work, sports, where we live, school, real estate, banking … pretty much if you name it, it happens in that environment.
Using the page in a book example
I’m going to take advantage of the book page example above. This time, think of the words on the page as people with privilege (if the Privilege chapter is still on the to-read list, this is a good time). In the U.S., privilege comes from money, class status, age, having no disability or illness, being White, male, Christian, heterosexual, etc.
On a book’s page, a word does not need to be physically in the center to have the most power, but in a society, a person does. And the more elements of privilege a person has, the closer to center they live.
A person without privilege (especially the privileges that fire up the -isms) lives life on or near the margins. This is not their choosing. Where on the margin they live depends on the combination of privileges they hold, those they don’t, and even the circumstances of the moment.
How to use the term
You will hear the term used both for an individual, “Pat felt marginalized from the moment he came out…,” or for a group, “They are a marginalized people.”
How it happens
A person can be marginalized by laws, religious practices, social practices, cultural practices, educational practices, etc., as well as by bullies who spring forth from any of those forms. Here are a few instances:
A religion can say a group is bad and exclude them, tell them to hide who they are, say God does not love them, ask the religion’s members to revile and discriminate against them, and even pressure the community to not serve or hire them and political leaders to make laws against them. This can happen in a whole religion or an isolated place of worship or geographic location.
A leader, especially political but not exclusive to that, can blame another country/race/religion for something and then loop in anyone who looks vaguely like the people from that Group and condemn them as well.
A country can pass laws that take care of the people living in the center of the page and ignore, or hurt, the people who don’t.
A county or town or building may be physically constructed in a way that excludes or marginalizes certain groups.
An educational style or system may benefit those who learn in the old traditional way (sit still, listen, read, and memorize) and hurt those who have other learning styles or learning disabilities (so many of us!).
I could go on.
Invisible to those people in the center
When one lives within the words on the page, the margins are far away and can be easy to not see. People in the center often don’t realize what’s happening to those on the margins. When they do realize, they often don’t understand the actual impact of whatever’s happening to those people. Sometimes, they feel too busy to do anything about it or, sadly, are just relieved it isn’t happening to them. Sometimes they’ve received such awful messaging about the people on the margins, they don’t care. Any of these can contribute to a person in the margin’s social, economic, political and legal invisibility. They can even make it worse.
The U.S. has this invisibility throughout its history, even through today. This is nothing to get defensive about, it’s just the truth.
A subtle today example
An example of marginalization that’s only visible to the individual can be seen in the situation faced by a grandma with limited resources who shared her story with me last spring. She was excited to vote. Her ballot was ready. Because she’s in a wheelchair, she couldn’t go to vote on her own. She had two voting options: mail in her ballot or to get a ride from her son on election day, though he wasn’t available until late, because of his job. Happily, the laws in her state provide ways to vote that honor all citizens, so she was going to be able to vote. But, if she lived in the parts of the country that now outlaw mail-in ballots, limit voting locations in economically under-resourced cities to one place per very large geographic area (which requires people without cars to take multiple buses or modes of transportation to get there), provide only a few voting booths in that location so there are hours-long lines, and open those polling stations for limited hours, this woman would not have had a way to vote. She couldn’t have used the mail-in option, her son wouldn’t have gotten off work in time, and she couldn’t have survived hours-long lines. Her political voice as a U.S. citizen would’ve been silenced because of her physical condition and none of us would ever have known.
The impact
As in the case of the disabled grandma, the ultimate impact is that marginalized people do not have the same opportunities or protections in almost all walks of life, and this plays out in a million ways for them. In addition, when it comes to speaking truth or asking for change, their voices are made socially small, not believed, or not even listened to.
The reasons for a group’s/person’s marginalization can be obvious or it can be subtle (visible only to those it hurts). It can be a modern situation or created by the way history has built into present day reality. Of course I have some specifics and examples to illustrate this.
Being marginalized informs identity
When a person or Group is marginalized, the reason for their marginalization becomes an identifier for them. It often becomes part of the way they think of themself and part of the way society thinks of them.
Here’s an example. An able-bodied person will not usually self-describe as being a person without disability. This aspect of who they are may not even occur to them. A person with a physical disability, on the other hand, will often introduce themselves by including their disability as they self-describe. People around them will do the same.
Our social norms are created by the center of the page. They inform what we think is necessary to identify and what we take for granted as the ‘normal’ way to be.
Twenty years ago, if I’d been asked to give an introduction where I described myself to a group, it would never have occurred to me to say, I’m Amy. I’m White, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical. I would have assumed these were all things assumed about me (if I even considered them at all). But if I were not one of these things, I would probably have mentioned it. (If I felt safe, that is).
Today, as people work to be more conscious, this is changing, but by and large a marginalized trait is both more actively part of an individual’s identity as well as one (or the) way a person who isn’t marginalized might describe them.
Marginalization in the U.S.
Though it may feel like Pete-repeat to see this list again, it bears naming. In the U.S., marginalization can be due to gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, education, economic status, class, age, or being physically, mentally or emotionally ill or disabled.
Some groups of people in the U.S. have been marginalized since Columbus arrived, and this was done by those who named themselves the land’s new leaders. For some reason, this makes certain people angry today, but it’s just the truth. These men put themselves at the center of the page, and possessing more advanced weapons, they took the social power and considered it their right. They even said God had declared it so. (Speaking for God is not always part of marginalizing people, but it unfortunately shows up quite often.)
In different yet similar ways, these men took, managed, and owned the land, bodies, children, voices, education, and rights of Native Americans, African Americans, and women.
Over time, additional people and groups have been marginalized in this nation. For some, like the Irish, Catholics, and Italians, marginalization has come and gone. For others, due to their appearance, willingness to publicly own who they are, religion, etc, it continues today.
Marginalization happens right smack in the middle of our everyday lives
Let’s go to the movies.
Ask: When I go to a movie theater or watch a box office hit at home, how many of the actors are people from my Groups?
I’m White. The vast majority of actors in U.S. movies are also White. Without realizing it, I watch movies filled with people who look like me. Usually someone like me, or who at least shares my race, is also the star.
Now, let’s consider people from a marginalized group. Pick any Group. Ask: How many from that group do I see in U.S. movies? Don’t stop the exercise when a Latine actor walks through the scene by saying, Look! There’s a Latine guy! See? Not all actors are White!
Instead, note what kinds of roles actors/actresses from that (or all) marginalized groups are given. Do they play the role of a serious and emotionally layered human being or are they a stereotype? Are they the good guy or the bad guy? Do they do things besides fight or play a sidekick? Do they have the lead? The romantic lead? If they have the lead, is their co-lead of the same race, from a different marginalized race, or White? Do they even matter plot-wise to the movie?
The vast majority of actors and lead actors are White. For those of us who’re White, this is so normal, so known and comfortable to us, we may not even notice it. (White and Male is even more common as a lead.)
But if we aren’t White? Let’s pause with one marginalized group in the U.S., people of Asian heritage, and consider.
Asian actors/actresses as an example
Let me first say, “Asian” is a very very broad demographic — like ⅓ of the world that includes a lot of countries — so this example pertains to being an Asian actor/actress in the U.S.
When we watch U.S. American movies, we see very few Asian actors, and those we do are often in small or silent roles (meaning they’re barely speaking or more or less in the background). They may be a sidekick. But the lead?
Don’t just say, “Well, this year there’s the incredible Everything, Everywhere, All At Once,” (And yes there is, woohoo! It’s the bomb!) (Update! Thrilling Oscar success!). Look instead at the big picture of all the films made and shown this year. Go ahead and expand to TV.
Did that? Now, go back in time and consider.
For most of our U.S. film history, it’s been as though Asian actors do not even exist (and they do, in case any of us weren’t sure, there are many many Asian actors).
Let’s just travel from the 1900s to now.
In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, almost all Asian characters in the movies were people living in a socially marginalized role: servant, prostitute, drug addict, laundry person, or coolie. And even in these roles, the majority were played by White actors.
An exception to this was Anna May Wong, a Chinese American actress. She was the first major Asian silent film star in the United States back in the first half of the 20th century. Despite her talent and success, however, Wong was not given the main part in The Good Earth, a movie about Chinese rural farmers. That role was given to a White actress who played the role in ‘yellow-face’ (makeup applied to make her look Asian). One of the reasons for this was a Hollywood law that made it illegal for interracial relationships to be portrayed on the screen. This law ensured the main characters that were Asian in the script still had to be played by White actors. So, Anna May Wong was out.
A second thing that’s continued over the years, is that Asian film characters are written to uphold stereotypes created by the center, often as Kung Fu masters or villains (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan) or as ridiculous caricatures (as in Pretty in Pink). Go watch a couple Brat Pack movies and see how we were portraying Chinese/Asian people in the mid-eighties. It’s horrifying.
For anyone who is not Asian, and who especially lives ‘on the page,’ I share this awfully humbling sidenote. Even though my brothers’ biological family and my biological family had joined to become one big Asian and White family 10+ years earlier, when I first watched those movies, I never realized how insulting and awful the portrayal of the Asian character was. It wasn’t until I re-watched Pretty in Pink sometime in the last ten years, that I saw. I could not believe what I was seeing. And I couldn’t believe even more what I hadn’t recognized at the time. It showed me the power of living a non-marginalized life — I’d been blind to everything but my own experience and perspective because I was safe. I’d laughed at the diminishment of a marginalized people and race, my own brothers’ race. I never realized that, besides Kung Fu masters, these ridiculously stereotyped characters were the only Asians shown to the American public on a movie screen.
Finally, the novels and scripts with major Asian characters have had those characters rewritten as White people as they’re adapted to the screen. Even when the Asian characters aren’t physically rewritten into White characters, they’re still often played by White actors. This is not ancient history. In 2015, Emma Stone starred as the Asian character in Aloha, and in 2017, Scarlett Johansson was cast as the main character in Ghost in the Shell, where the leading role was based on a female Japanese anime character.
There’s a term in Hollywood, “Bankable actors,” which refers to actors that Hollywood believes it can bank on to bring in the sales dollars. Asian actors (along with other actors of color, aging females, members of the queer community who don’t pass as straight, and people with disabled bodies) have not been viewed by the establishment as bankable unless cast in certain roles (read: Jackie Chan). As a result, Asian actors have remained marginalized, mainly getting jobs on the fringe (if at all) of the big screen world.
Do not forget to ask: Who makes the casting decisions? It’s important to understand that most of the directors, producers, and funders in TV and film are male and White, people living in the very center of the page. Their perspective of who is hireable and popular is colored by the way they see the world, and so, too, is the way they see (and allow to be portrayed) those who are marginalized.
How the everyday plays into how we see the world
The impact of being marginalized in this way rolls in so many directions. There have been many Asian American kids who would have loved to grow up to be actors, they just didn’t have role models to guide them and didn’t (and still don’t) get many big parts (or parts at all). A whole race of actors and aspiring children see mainly a door closed to almost everyone of their race.
Imagine: I’m Asian and I love to go to the movies (and watch TV). I do this with my children. And yet, people who look like me and my children are almost nowhere to be found on the screen. The absence of me and my kids on the screen has been normalized — not just for me, I realize, but for my non-Asian friends and my children’s non Asian friends as well. Sometimes what we see are stereotypes of Asian people, many of them not a way I would ever want people to think of me or my children.
Pause. What does this say to my children? What does this say to non-Asian children? What does it say to me? What does it say to non-Asian adults? What does it message to non-Asian people who don’t know any Asian people?
An equally enormous cost is that the way U.S. movies portray everyday American life makes it seem as if Asians are not an integral part of American life, let alone possible love partners, best friends, or heroic figures who can change the world. This lack of acknowledgement (invisibility) is hard on anyone Asian, especially children in their formative years, and I am certain it’s dangerous for us all. Lack of representation on the screen separates us into our Groups and allows us to either ignore/ forget one another or continue to not be able to see one another for who we are and the potential we offer.
The purpose of this one example
I’m sharing this with the hopes it offers an opportunity to gain some insight and understanding into the experience of being marginalized and its costs. Try to inhabit it.
Please don’t get lost in the example of the movies. Movies and actors are only one illustration of what results from something much larger at play.
A historical-into-present day example
As wrote earlier, our nation has three groups that have been marginalized from the time the Europeans landed on the Eastern shores. When marginalization begins that long ago and goes unaddressed, the impact and experience of being marginalized deepens and broadens in a million visible and invisible ways over the centuries. Marginalization of this type also becomes ingrained in the way a nation and its people operate, develop, and see the world.
For this chapter, I’m going to focus on the Native American community. The history of what happened to Native Americans here is so deep and enormous that an entire collection of books is necessary for our learning, and I apologize in advance for the simplicity I use in portraying what happened. My fear, and what I know I cannot avoid, is an unforgivable surface look. But for anyone who is only beginning to learn about this word, and to understand what it’s like when it has centuries underpinning it, I ultimately decided that leaving this out altogether was worse than giving an abbreviated example.
As we all know, the entire Native American race (tribe) had their land and homes violently taken from them. Then they were forced to move far away to live on what was usually quite substandard remote land that could not sustain their former way of life. Do not forget the trauma, death, and loss that was embedded in the process and the ongoing impact that has on a people especially, as in this case, when it’s unrecognized and unaddressed. The people who killed and moved them were made national heroes, and have been recognized in this way ever since. Pause with that.
Over the centuries, nothing for Native Americans was secure. The reservation land given to them was often reduced when the people in power felt they needed to take some back for this own needs(this is happening even today, see Minnesota for example). Everything on the reservation was wildly under-resourced, including health care. In addition, the language that those with social power used to describe Native Americans while in the process of killing them and taking their land continued to flow forward through those who occupied the center of the page and created laws and jobs and public opinion, etc. It stereotyped an entire people in ways that robbed them of credibility, rights, the ability to be hired or get necessary resources, and even the perception that they had equal human value. Later, White churches, universities, governments, social agencies, hospitals, etc, created programs in which Native women were force-sterilized, children were taken from their families to be re-educated and Christianized in places like Catholic missions, and Native people were institutionalized and studied and experimented on by the combined forces listed earlier in a program called eugenics.
Think of the social messaging these things broadcast to the rest of the world about Native People’s value as human beings. Think of the untreated trauma inflicted on them as individuals and a group. Think of how unseen all that trauma was to the people who were living safely around the center of the page. Think of how others approved of it.
Kept geographically far away, allowed no political voice, and unable to protect their land from ongoing devastating corporate pollution taking place at their borders, the Native American community has also been subject to significant centuries of economic marginalization. There are many elements to this, but an important specific example of historical-to-present economic marginalization has been that Native American homeowners who live on reservations have never been allowed to borrow against, sell, or develop their personal properties. Pause here. This is the very way most U.S. citizens have been able to create economic security.
In the U.S., owning a house is an enormous financial boon and “account(s) for 62% of a median homeowner’s total assets and 42% of their wealth.” Here’s why. Owning a home is an economic asset because the owner can use it as a guarantee to obtain a loan (say for college, or home improvement if the roof leaks, or even to cover medical costs), develop it so that it’s larger or better and worth more later, and sell it (often for a profit) when they are ready to downsize or move. The ability to own and improve and utilize property ensures their future, and often that of their children.
Now, compare this to Native people who can’t borrow against, sell, or develop their homes because it’s against the law. In 2020, 55% of Native American and Alaska Native households owned their homes and 72% of White households owned theirs. But only one group could use this enormous asset as financial protection or to seed financial growth.
The ability to save money over time is a critical way of moving onto the page in this country; it is an integral part of the American dream.(1)
Though these are only a couple examples of a much larger reality (none of it gets better), if we can resist fighting the discomfort of seeing it and instead just look, listen, and go learn more, we will begin to recognize how acts like these and their repercussions are incredibly important to understanding Native American life today.
Finally, listen to the social language
Some people do not want to recognize or understand what it means to be marginalized. So listen carefully when negative language is used to describe and blame marginalized communities. This language is a flashing light that reveals the beating heart of the act of marginalization. It’s intent is to keep people in the center of the page comfortable, and it does this by teaching them to:
- believe a marginalized person has less value
- stop caring about their situation
- ignore any causes and realities and instead blame them for their circumstances
- not get involved or feel any responsibility
Here we are
It all creates a circle. Is it complex? Of course it often is. But when people aren’t visually represented, heard, seen, believed, respected, accepted, etc, it’s easy for a person of a different Group to forget that they matter, let alone that they exist as members of society. Then they aren’t given roles as words on the page. And then they aren’t seen or heard or believed or represented or accepted or cared for.
And on it goes until we decide to stop and see. This is our Neighbor work, isn’t it?
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Neighbor: a Handbook is written with the hope of de-weaponizing both contemporary ‘hot’ language and our current divisive human practices in order to bring us together as Neighbors, working with one another for the whole. I’m releasing it one chapter at a time, and the first chapter is “Part One: Introduction.” If you’re enjoying Neighbor and haven’t yet followed me on Medium, please feel free to click the ‘follow’ option. If you’d like to receive an email when a new chapter is released, there’s an email icon next to the follow button that will make this happen. And of course, please feel free to share this book with anyone you feel would enjoy or benefit from it. Our Neighbor work extends beyond each of us, so if you share it, please do so with Love. Most of all, thanks for traveling with me. I wish you well.
