Minor Feelings, Minor Frauds
Several weeks ago, I participated in a volunteer training with a social justice organization that works with local schools. In one session, I found myself in a Zoom breakout room with a number of fellow volunteers, mostly Black and Latinx folks. The group facilitator did what group facilitators do – they got a discussion going with an almost embarrassingly straightforward question: Did you experience oppression in the K-12 classroom? If so, how?
Like a flood, stories came pouring out. Folks spoke of being subjected to structural racism in the education system, of enduring interpersonal discrimination from peers and white teachers. I suppose it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to me. I’ve been in the field of DEI for nearly a decade. I can cite you the scholarship, point you towards the most recent literature, maybe even connect you with researchers who toil away on the subject of structural oppression in our school systems. And I’ve worked in enough DEI positions at predominantly white institutions to know how painful the experience can be for students of color, especially Black students. It was, in other words, familiar territory.
But this time it hit differently.
I’ve written elsewhere about how the K-12 classroom and the college classroom affirmed me, made me feel worthy. How teachers assumed I would be quick, smart, and docile. I was, in other words, the good little brown girl they expected me to be. Consequently, school became my home away from home. I’ve written, too, about what it felt like to have that feeling ripped away from me when I went to graduate school. But was I really going to tell my sob story of all the ways I felt excluded while getting my PhD at, of all places, Princeton University? No – not the time or place. And not for the first time, I wondered if I even belonged in that room.
I’ve been reading Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. She’s honest, almost uncomfortably so, depicting herself warts-and-all. And she describes the Asian-American experience in a way I’ve not seen before. Most of the time, I find that the Asian-American experience is discussed as a sort of “racial melancholia,” trapped as we are between the white/black binary upon which this country was founded. Last month, I tried to push the conversation a bit further, grappling with the ways that both East and South Asian Americans nevertheless are granted a sort of proximity to whiteness that, taken to the extreme, puts us on the wrong side of history.
According to Hong Park, the term minor feelings refers to “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned and dismissed” (55). As Asian Americans, we are “compliant strivers” in a white supremacist society that thinks we’re as “interchangeable as lint” (48, 9). But the thing is, throughout the book, she seems to struggle with the fact that we, as Asian Americans, also question ourselves, perhaps inflicting some of these minor feelings upon ourselves. We “peck [ourselves] to death,” she writes, for not being white enough, for not being “real minorities” (10). Consequently, we are burdened with a sense of shame – “a neurotic, self-inflicted wound” that never goes away because, in the end, we know in our hearts that we are minor frauds (75).
I thought about all the times I’ve felt like a minor fraud since I joined the field of DEI. In fact, when I first considered pursuing a career in DEI, a South Asian mentor cautioned me. “They’re not looking for people like you and me,” she said. The implication being that I am not minority enough to serve in positions that advocate for historically marginalized students. She suggested that, instead, I ought to apply for positions working with international students. But I know nearly nothing about the international student experience, I thought. Most of my experiences align me with the “real minorities,” right?
I think, too, of the many professional development seminars and person of color (POC) affinity group meetings I’ve attended with fellow DEI practitioners. The rooms are filled with Black and Latina women who, quite understandably, predominate in the field. There is always a random Asian American or two, like me, in the room. But we know to remain silent. We are well-versed in the histories of Asian Americans who have aligned themselves with the forces of white supremacy in the US. We are all too familiar with the ugly stories of oppression in this country, the faintest echo of which “our” people have experienced. As the stories of daily slights, indignities, and both micro and macroaggressions that these women experience fill the space, we retreat further into ourselves, knowing that the stereotypes about us work in our favor, more often than not.
In those rooms, I am keenly aware that South Asian Americans only became real minorities after 9/11. Because of pervasive Islamophobia and a kind of careless assumption that all dark-skinned people might be enemies within, we have had the dubious honor of being included in the umbrella term “Black and Brown folks.” Still, our position in this coalition is contingent, and we know it. We are looked upon with suspicion as outsiders and invaders. In those spaces where I’m with real minorities, I fold into myself. I exist, but I take up what Park Hong calls “apologetic space” (9).
So in that volunteer training I sat silent, as I often do. I listened, as you’re supposed to do. I got caught up in my minor feelings, as I sometimes do. And, when it was my turn to speak, I said the only thing that made sense to me: “Pass.”