There are many ways of being a minority. I had this brought home to me in 1973, when I worked in the East Elmhurst branch of the Queens Borough Public Library. East Elmhurst is a solidly middle-class, home-owning, civic-minded African-American neighborhood, one of many such minority neighborhoods in Queens. East Elmhurst was the home of Louis Armstrong and Malcolm X. When I first came there I was the only white librarian in the branch. There were two African-American and two Chinese librarians, and one from India.

I had the task of working with the young people, a specialty I had trained for at Columbia University. One of the regular programs we had was a book discussion club and I had signed up five black adolescent girls for it. They had to be pretty brave to have anything to do with this white stranger, but I also remember that they were testing me out. They chose for their first book Eldredge Cleaver's SOUL ON ICE. It is a very forthright, profoundly disturbing and often angry book. I had read it before, but I knew they had not. When the day of the discussion arrived, they all seemed embarrassed. Finally one girl said to me, "How could you read this? How could you read what he says about white women?" Cleaver had been a rapist who use rape of white women as a way to express his anger against racism.

Her question was a good one. My answer was that while his conduct was abhorrent and frightening to me I understood his anger and his pain. This led to a discussion very different from the one I had envisioned. We began to talk about the many ways of being a minority and they began to reflect on how each of them was sometimes in the minority and sometimes in the majority and that it didn't just have to do with race.

In their school, African-Americans were in the majority, but there were many differences. Some of the girls were good at schoolwork, others not. Some were from the south, others from the mid-west, others from families who were long-standing residents of the community and community leaders. Some were light, some were dark, some heavy, some slim, some liked poetry, some popular music, some were well-to-do, some poor. By the end of the session, we had all come to look at each other differently. And as we shared our common minority status, we could see that you could be one for good reasons, bad reasons and reasons beyond your control. But even the best of reasons, like not smoking or keeping out of trouble with the law can bring with it a separation from others that is painful.

While talking with the girls, I realized for the first time that my experiences in being miserable in elementary school had opened me up to seeing the world from the point of view of a minority. To me, being different means experiencing good and bad. The good is that one can develop a sensitivity and an empathy for others because one has been there. The bad is that it hurts.

5/16/98

© Rosemarie E. Falanga, Cy H. Silver