A Minority View

Well, I'm back from my conference, refreshed intellectually, emotionally, and mentally, but unfortunately physically suffering from a bad head cold (that's what I get from very little sleep and more wine than I normally imbibe!)

One of the things I took away from the past four days was a renewed appreciation for having a "minority view." I don't necessarily mean my perspective as a racial minority, although I suppose there's that, but the perspective I have had, over the years, from being one of the "only ones" in the room--whether that is based on gender or race or geography or a host of other factors that have positioned me on the margins.

I think that a minority view has given me a broader sense of the world--certainly it has exposed me to thinking that I would not normally have experienced if I had continually found myself in a majority position. For example, take nationality. Yes, I'm in a "majority" position in terms of being an American citizen. And it would be easy to just say "We're #1! America is the world's superpower!" in this uncritical way, but having a minority position has made me see a perspective of U.S. nationalism that is not quite so one-dimensional or rosy. And has made me appreciate that you can critique something and try to make it better without throwing out the whole concept.

It has allowed, in other words, a complexity of thought that I don't know I would get if I found myself in a majority perpsective. And being at this conference, I was reminded of this because so many of my friends and colleagues working in Asian American studies are also "the only one" in their institutions, regardless of what their personal subject position might be.

So here's to those of us in the minority, in whatever way that might be. Maybe it's lonely sometimes, but there may just be more of us "minority" perspectives out there than we think--and I think our thinking has been better because of it!