Sheila Morris

The Minority Struggle

Model minorities are not to be confused with minorities, who are not actually immigrants at all.  Minorities did not come to the America by choice.  Minorities such as African Americans were brought her against their will to be held in slavery.  In the case of the American Indian, they were here first, were pushed off their lands and into areas they did not seek out or desire.  The American Indian story is one of reversal of fortune.  Neither the American Indian nor the African American made the choice to be in the United States.  Minorities did not come to the United States to make a better life for themselves, sadly, for the most part, their lives were much worse once they got here.  Thus, minority cultures have no interest and very little to gain from assimilating into the dominant culture.  Even if they try to achieve the American Dream, the dominant culture does not make it easy.

The dominant culture has no interest in assimilating.  The dominant culture adapts.  In her mid term paper, “The Immigrant and the Minority” Chrissie Johnston writes,

“While immigrant narratives are mostly about the shocks and struggles immigrants face in the new world, minority narratives are generally about a fight to maintain their uniqueness or assimilating only for acceptance. The bottom line is that immigrants are “allowed” to assimilate. Minorities, even those of mixed races, those that are part white, are still fighting to be accepted and this is why many minorities fight to remain a distinct race.”

          In her poem, Blonde White Women, Patricia Smith tells of her struggle in a world where blonde hair and “pink” skin was desired.  She writes of being a child and playing with the mop or her father’s white shirt to give herself “blonde” hair, and of trying to color her skin with a pink crayon.  She explains the pain in having her first grade teacher hug her when she was the first to read only to push her away after the hug took too long, while looking like she wanted to wash.

          Some of the minority narrative is surprising.  In Olaudah Equiano, The African, after being kidnapped, forced into slavery and torn from his sister, Equiano still looked at the world with wonder and looked at the white man as better.  In Chapter IV, he writes,

“I now not only felt myself quite easy with these new countrymen, but relished their society and manners. I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners; I therefore embraced every occasion of improvement; and every new thing that I observed I treasured up in my memory. . .”

In Mei Mei Evans, Gussak, the protagonist, Lucy has come to the village of Kigiak, Alaska to work as a public health nurse.  She is a Chinese-American woman from Boston, but to the villagers, she might as well be from the moon.  The story is full of dominant culture themes.  Lucy wears a khaki skirt and tasseled loafers to make a good impression in the beginning of the story.  By dressing this way, she adopts the dominant culture stance of blending in and becoming invisible.  This is in contrast by the color clothing of the women that greet her when she gets off the plane.  Lucy portrays a protestant work ethic as she files and busies herself in the clinic.  Even though she feels superior to the villagers, she makes an attempt to gain their acceptance by trying their food and befriending their children.  The villagers seem hopeless and dreamless in this narrative.  Even Robert, with whom Lucy has an affair is sad and seems to be aimless.  Unlike immigrant narratives, there is nothing for the people of this village to hope for or to work toward.

Another narrative where the people are sad and hopeless is American Horse by Louise Erdich.  Much like Sin Sin Far’s In the land of the free, this is a story where a child is taken from his mother by the authorities.  Unlike the Far’s Asian immigrant narrative that has a “sort of” happy ending, the American Indian boy is taken because the mother is an alcoholic.  There is no happy ending to this story, only a hopeless feeling of loss.

Luckily, I have never experienced the “otherness” that is so apparent in minority narrative.  However, my mother has experience this.  She once told me that when she had only been in American for a day that she noticed a Colored water fountain.  She thought to herself, “Oh what a great country this is, they even have colored water!”  When she finished taking a drink, a large white man grabbed her and slapped her calling her a name that I won’t repeat.  My first thought was, welcome to America.