What does it mean to be a minority?

Most people are quite surprised at how I frame that question. As with most provocative cultural issues, my views on the matter fall somewhat outside of the traditional orthodoxy.

For starters, the issue of minority status to me extends far, far beyond questions of race and ethnicity. I am an African American, an American racial minority, and I readily and openly identify as such in external contexts. But as far as my internal self-identification goes, being Black forms at best a negligible part of my self-perception. This traces directly to events in my childhood, the schema that was embedded into me as part of my upbringing. For as long as I can remember, there has existed a sort of inherent tension between myself and what would be considered the "traditional set" of Black cultural elements. I was not raised in a particularly religious household - my mother was a (Protestant) Christian but, other than Easter, we rarely attended church and religion never became a significant part of my life. By the time that I was a teenager, my core values were rooted in an atheism and secularism commonly considered a part of the "white, educated class"; as a whole, African Americans are among the most religious of racial groups, and I was often reminded of that as part of how I must not forget my "heritage" when dealing with elders in the Black community (I could go into a diatribe here on the fact that Christian values are in fact not indigenous to Blacks, and that said Christian values provided a moral foundation for hundreds of years of slave trading, racial insubordination, segregation, and second-class citizenship; but I'll leave that unpleasant discussion for another day.) I trace, at its core, my differentiation from "mainstream Black culture" to my secular upbringing, given the fact that the church is the main instrument of socialization in the African American community. There were dozens of other more negligible, but oftentimes important, cultural issues as well that either flowed from that distinction or influenced it; the way that I spoke, the music that I listened to, the food that I ate, the types of books that I read, even the way that I dressed; in many ways, none of these ever seemed to fall in line with what was the "norm" of Black people in my highly segregated community. The results were fascinating; from my earliest recollection, I have always had at best a tiny few - perhaps 1 or 2 - truly "close" Black friends, and at many times I had none. But despite that and perennial "whitest black guy" remarks, I was clearly not white. Consequently, race gradually but surely lost its importance as an element of self-identification for me; broadly, race in general lost its importance. In my preferences and way of viewing the world throughout these developmental years, I attempted to be as race-neutral as possible in my thinking. This certainly does not mean that I "neglected" or "forgot" my heritage, as some might suggest; rather, my skin color never became a definitive or even significant aspect of my personality or identification - at least between the ages of roughly 5 and 16.

The problem, if you will, is that I was still clearly different in a veritable myriad of other ways, and being different in these ways and being Black only furthered my "otherness" from 99% of the people around me. As I grew up and became increasingly cognizant of these differences and how they inhibited my ability to "connect" with run-of-the-mill, average Joe types, I increasingly came to identify them and collectively integrate them into my personality. These aspects - not my racial identity - became the integral parts of how I framed my identity as a minority. Things like being an atheist in an overwhelmingly Christian community (and country), like being a hardcore liberal in an overwhelmingly Republican environment, like being from an at best culturally neutral family in a community overflowing with all of the worst vestiges of Southern pride, like staying in and reading books while all of the other boys - black and white - were out learning to play sports, and beyond doubt like being gay in an environment overwhelmingly intolerant of anything outside of the heterosexual "norm" (I was acutely aware of my sexuality from my very early teen years and in fact outed myself to a very close friend while in high school, but that remained a guarded secret until well into my undergrad years.) Being African American to me was as self-evident and inconsequential as being 5'11 or having brown eyes; it was the myriad of other elements that I embraced as part of my "minority" status.

Consequently, I am maddeningly frustrated when I see discussions on "minorities" in America reduced to the tried-and-true debates on race and ethnicity. I face far, far more overt and serious discrimination as an openly gay man than I ever will as an African American. Being Black would not disqualify me from running from political office, but being an atheist ensures that I could never reach the political heights obtained by Barack Obama, no matter my qualifications and experience. I have never been called "weird" for being Black, but I cannot even begin to count the number of times I have been called "weird" for being a man with no interest in sports and athletics. To be a minority extends far beyond the immutable property of race; it is a function of all of those personal traits, inherent and adopted, that differentiate us from what is the defined "mainstream" culture of any given society at any given time. In America, we might define that culture as being dominated by rigid suburban, Christian heterosexual WASP families, the vast majority lacking a college education, though this is (thankfully) much less true than in past years.

My wish is to see a day when the term "minority" no longer automatically invokes race, but rather defines a much-more nuanced and deliberative discussion on personal traits and how they relate to the larger society. I can but dream...

But of course, as I have matured my perceptions on race have indeed transformed from those of my earlier years. I experienced racism directly, while traveling through Deep South states such as Alabama; I experienced racism in an even more profound way while in high school, in a series of events that still conjure up extremely acerbic memories. In my studies of demographics I am continually extremely shaken by the divisions - indeed, vast chasms - that exist in this country between racial groups. I saw the racial divisions in social activities and more that still persist on campuses such as the University of Florida and Carnegie Mellon; as a college-educated black man, I became part of yet another very tiny minority (only 16.5% of Black men over 25 hold college degrees), an when I graduate from Carnegie Mellon, I will become part of the only 4.6% - yes, less than 5 percent - of Blacks with advanced degrees. As a gay man I have become aware of the pervasive, if not subterranean, racism that exists within often white-majority LGBT groups. And as the cumulative result of these experiences, I arrived at a fundamental truth: No matter what I do and how I define myself through my beliefs and actions, American mainstream society - the "majority" - will always define me as a Black man. Period. And while being Black is still just another part of the soup of various groups that I identify with - it never will be an overwhelming part of my self-identification - it has become a much more important element. Where racial disparities did not bother me when younger, I find myself often downright furious at them today. Where I used to regard programs such as welfare and affirmative action as tired vestiges of a long-forgotten past, I regard them as core necessities in racial reconciliation today. Where as a 14 year old I would have lambasted Pastor Jeremiah Wright as a bigot on par with Pat Robertson, I today recognize how the white mainstream majority, shielded safely in their homogeneous gated communities, is utterly incapable of understanding that type of poverty and despair that he so fiercely condemns in his sermons. When I was picked on by other Black kids for being "a nerd" who used "big words" in middle school, I thought to myself "I will have so much more than those kids one day"; today as a more refined adult, I think of how fortunate I was to have been raised in a household with a highly-educated parent, of how little I ultimately had to do with my own success, of how my mother endured being sneered as part of one of the first classes to integrate schools in Kentucky so that I and those other Black kids might one day attend schools largely absent of racial division, and how I was not the victim for being jeered at by those kids, but that they in fact were the victims of a pathetic, racist system that has created cities where college-educated and largely white residents live in unimaginable luxury and decadence while, often mere miles away, Black residents often live in such squalor and poverty that merely walking down the street at night is a dangerous proposition.

Those recognitions were of the utmost importance, as they affirmed my "blackness." While I may still exist nearly entirely outside of the mainstream Black community, being African American is no longer merely a negligible part of my personality and minority status - nor should it be.

In a way, America is nothing more than an amalgamation of hordes of varying minorities, often in conflict but always striving for the same fundamental goals: a better life, a peaceful world, and most importantly of all, acceptance and respect for their status as fellow human beings and Brothers and Sisters sharing this world. Race and ethnicity are unquestionably one part of this complex equation, but hardly the entirety of it; still to do this day, when I think of myself as a "minority" I am more likely to cite being gay or being a secularist as the most influential and definitive aspects - not my race. And perhaps one day we will all come to that realization about our fellow citizens - identity is more than skin deep - and what a better country, and world, that will be.