The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America - Softcover

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Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and educator. Her work has appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, n+1, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, Salon, and Mother Jones. She is the co-founder of Speech/Act, and organization working at the intersection of storytelling and social justice.

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The Marginalized Majority
INTRODUCTION

We have frequently printed the word Democracy.

Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d…It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.

—WALT WHITMAN, DEMOCRATIC VISTAS1

DURING A RECENT VISIT WITH my mother, I sat flipping through an old photo album I’d never seen before. Inside were images of our extended family on my mother’s side, stretching back to the time I was about four years old. My mother sat close to me, leaning in to offer captions as I turned the pages. I was laughing at the way I could chart the march of adolescence by my increasingly less amused facial expressions. As my cheeks began to grow more slender, the open smile transformed, offering up a paltry, tight-lipped semblance instead.

Toward the end of the album was an image that startled me: my mother and I sitting around a large table at a restaurant, most of her side of the family arranged in seats, beaming at the camera. My face, the only brown one at the table, stands out for another reason: I’m not even attempting a smile. In fact, I look furious. I noticed that my mother, who had been eagerly narrating the who, what, and where of each image, had gone silent. When I turned to look at her, she said simply, “Oh.” “What?” I asked. My mother looked uncomfortable. “Well,” she said, “if you don’t remember, maybe it’s better that way.” This, of course, only piqued my curiosity. “Tell me,” I said. My mother sighed. The dinner was to celebrate her parents’ wedding anniversary; my uncle had just finished going around the table with his video camera in hand, naming everyone at the table. Except he had skipped over us.

Here was a historical moment I had forgotten until it resurfaced.

Uncle Bill didn’t “believe in mixed marriage.” Growing up, if I ever found myself in the same room or around the same dinner table as him, I could rely on one thing: He would not acknowledge my existence. He did not look at me and he did not speak to me. My general response was to simply ignore Bill the way he ignored me, though it would take me years before I could articulate how there was a power differential at play: He ignored me because my existence challenged his sensibilities. I ignored him because his sensibilities challenged my existence.

In retrospect, I’m grateful for the experience of growing up around my uncle Bill. Encountering racism and its tolerance in my own family gave me a model for what it means to grow up in America.

Of course, I did not have this outlook when I was a child. The situation felt like a private matter. I didn’t tell my friends about the uncle who did not speak to me. I did not ask my mother questions about what it meant. Before I found my way to placing this experience in a broader framework of the institutional racism at the heart of this country’s founding, it was a personal, even shameful, story to hold. I didn’t want to look at it any more closely because I feared that if I scratched the surface, what I would come away with were concrete reasons why I was less worthy of acknowledgment, of acceptance—even of existence—in this country.

THESE QUESTIONS OF WHO belongs and who doesn’t, who is a person worth counting and who isn’t, have always preoccupied us in America. There’s the early stuff of our country’s founding—the “handful” of “uncivilized” and “intractable” natives who populated the country before Europeans landed on its shores, offering the gifts of these preposterously off-base adjectives along with smallpox and influenza plagues. When those indigenous people died en masse from those plagues, as well as deliberate slaughter, the African slave trade filled the gap—men, women, and children shackled and shipped over to the New World to provide a new form of free labor to sustain the country’s economy. Then there were the waves of willing immigrants who arrived seeking a better life. With so many cultures and languages colliding on America’s shores, there has always been tension, and the attendant question of whether being American means to scrub yourself of your particularities, or to celebrate them.

We learn about the fractioning of human beings in a section of our high school history textbooks: each slave counting as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of getting slave owners more representation in Congress. We’re encouraged to read these historical narratives as static, safely ensconced in the container of the past, where they ostensibly remain without leaking. We’re encouraged to think of ourselves as outside of that history, too—here to study it rather than participate in the making of it. The narrative, say, of our country overturning Jim Crow, comes to us framed in a tone of inevitability. Of course we had to do away with these unfair laws, the logic of these few glossy pages in our history books implies, it was just a matter of time.

There’s something tricky in the definition of “history” as we commonly use it—the study of past events. Viewed in this way, history ruptures continuity, severing itself from the present and future. Maybe there is a kind of American-hued wish at the heart of this understanding of history—to not be lashed to the past, to invent ourselves anew. But, of course, this severance is impossible.

The word “history” comes from the Greek historia, meaning “knowledge acquired by investigation.” There’s more promise in this etymology—room for engagement and continuity. We are accustomed to thinking of the future as containing unknowns. But the past, too, is full of hidden and lesser-known narratives. What might these narratives tell us about who we are and what’s possible?

How does it change our understanding of the United States, for instance, to acknowledge that contemporary estimates of indigenous peoples in the Americas put the population at roughly 50–100 million people in the late 1400s before they were decimated by European diseases—ten times that of earlier estimates?2 Or that many of these indigenous civilizations were far more advanced in agriculture, architecture, and mathematics than the early British and Spanish empires?3 How does it change our understanding of our country to learn that the US Constitution was modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy? Or that, by 1860, the United States counted 4 million slaves among its population, valued at a worth of $3.5 billion—making them, as historian David Blight points out, the largest financial asset in the US economy, worth more than all railroads and manufacturing combined?4

What do these narratives tell us about whose country this is?

WE ARE MANY. WE ARE ONE. The copper two-cent coin was first issued in 1864, and it was conspicuously missing the usual motto: E pluribus unum—“out of many, one.” The Civil War was in its third year, and it seemed impossible to agree on who were the many, and who were the one. Fast forward to 1938, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was created to investigate whether any Americans had communist ties, which, according to the committee’s calculus, would make them un-American. Fast forward even further to 2008, when, just days before the presidential election, Minnesota Republican representative Michele Bachmann accused...