We are who we are. From the very beginning, we are intrinsic.
That is what we are supposed to think, at least. As humans, we are basically programed to think that we have a natural place in this world.
However, people view each other’s natural place differently. That’s right, we are all judgmental, narcissistic people who only care about ourselves and what others think about us. To make ourselves feel better, we segregate others into groups we deem different.
A minority is a subsidiary of a larger group whose members have significantly less control over their individual lives than members of the more dominant or majority group, according to racism.org.
In addition, a minority group is a group of people who experience a lessening of opportunities, whether that be success, education or wealth. Those opportunities are disproportionately low compared to societal numbers and norms, the website said.
I don’t necessarily believe those definitions completely define a minority group. After some less-than-extensive research, also known as a survey I posted to my Facebook page, I learned that my Facebook friends and I see minority differently.
Respondent one defined minority as, “A group that is less than the majority of those around them.”
They said nothing about a lack of opportunities or control.
Respondent two, while also defining minority, was quick to note that although minority refers to a group of humans, who refer to a category of people differentiated from the social norm around them, it is not necessarily numerical.
Think about it for a moment. One minority in our country, according to respondent two’s personal definition, could easily be people in a position of power, like our lawmakers, who we consider majority because they have majority of the power when it comes down to making the laws. However, there are far less of them than there are of the “average Joe.”
In the end, my thought process is something along these lines: As a white, middle class, female American, how am I not a minority? You never hear anything about people in my demographic being the minority.
Honestly, after typing the word “minority” into my Google search and the first drop-down option being, “minority scholarships.” I was initially irritated. It brought to the surface infuriating thoughts I had as a senior in high school applying for scholarships and not qualifying for them because I didn’t fit into some tiny mold.
The lovely people handing out money are telling me and others like me that we are not qualified because we are not the minority. But, in my opinion, we are the minority when you clump all the other minorities together.
We find ourselves as the minority because we feel the need to classify people into minority groups.
The sheer amount of scholarships available to minorities are available because these populations of students are underrepresented, and specialized scholarships are an effort to make higher education more accessible to minority groups, according to BestColleges.com section, “Financial aid opportunities for minority students.”
There are infinite, complex reasons that minority students have decreased rates of enrollment and graduation, not just financial reasoning, BestColleges.com said.
There are so many ways to classify minority, and it is increasingly difficult to do so in the current political dome we are all suffocating from. The politics surrounding us make it even easier to want to throw people into those little groups and weed them out.
So I vote we stop using the word “minority,” and I am not alone.
“Not surprisingly, most of the states that experienced growth in populations of minority children are the ones where white children are in the majority: California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi and Maryland,” KTLA-TV in Los Angeles said in Phuong Ly’s Poynter article, “As people of color become a majority, is it time for journalists to stop using the term ‘minorities’?”
So can we please, for the love of our freedom, stop using the word “minority” and accept that we are all equal? We all live in the same country and are allowed the same rights and freedoms.
We are all functioning human beings. Is that concept not enough? Is it too difficult to grasp?
You would think if our country started thinking as one majority instead of separating and stigmatizing people into minorities, we wouldn’t have so many internal issues.
