As teenagers and young adults, we write the story of who we are – and it’s a story with multiple perspectives. One perspective is self-understanding: We come to understand our personality, our abilities and our preferences. Another perspective is like looking down from the viewpoint of a narrator to see how other people understand us. Are you included or excluded? Are your thoughts and opinions respected or overlooked? Do you make people comfortable or uncomfortable? Do people generally want you to succeed or fail? How people relate to us can influence how we relate to them, and as this transaction bounces back and forth, it can eventually lead to feeling like a part of a community or feeling like you’re looking in the window of a party for which you never got an invitation. It can even feel like being accepted by a community that will never really be your own.
It’s easy to say, Forget those people, and decide that self-understanding is enough – that knowing yourself is the only perspective that matters, and decide to firewall yourself emotionally from the negative ways that others perceive you. But giving in to marginalization has consequences. An American Psychological Association report found that LGBT and racial minority adults who have experienced discrimination have average stress levels of 6.4 on a 10-point scale, while majority race, non-LGBT adults who have not experienced discrimination average 5.0. One survey of LGBTQ teens found that they experienced high levels of anxiety, feelings of rejection, and fear for their safety. Other research found that undocumented Latina immigrants reached the minimum factors for PTSD nearly four times (34%) the rate of U.S. women overall (9.7%).
These highly visible causes of marginalization such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, disability and sexual orientation aren’t the only reasons young people may feel marginalized. Take young people who feel like their relationship is marginalized – for example, maybe a teenager whose parents disapprove of the person they are dating. Research shows that people in a marginalized relationship have poorer physical health, lower self-esteem and riskier health behaviors, including more cigarette smoking and less frequent condom use.
Really, it doesn’t take much digging to discover that being young and marginalized puts people at higher risk of pretty much every physical and mental health challenge you can imagine, and points marginalized people toward lower achievement, lower wealth and even lower life expectancy.
So while the paths into marginalization vary, they all lead a place where people have to fight against a headwind to reach happiness, health or prosperity. That’s not to say it can’t be done: Every person is different and some marginalized young people will succeed. But they have to succeed despite the wind in their faces pushing them back every step of the way.
What can we all do from within and from outside these populations to decrease these headwinds? The answer is…it’s tricky.
One study looked at male bosses who over-praised female employees. On one hand, these bosses offered more praise to a marginalized group. You might think this was a way to offer extra support that would lead to higher performance, raises and promotions. Unfortunately, this artificial praise was also patronizing. It was as if the male boss didn’t expect the female employee to be able to perform at the level of male employees and so was praising female employees for work quality that was simply expected of others. This patronizing was paired with poorer work performance. And it was not paired with raises or promotions.
“To be patronized is to be treated as if you are less intelligent or knowledgeable than the person you’re speaking with, and it can be one of the most frustrating experiences you can have in life,” writes Dr. Nathaniel Granger in a Saybrook University alumni publication.
In other words, there’s the danger of over-correction. If it used to be that under-valuing the contributions of marginalized groups (whether at work or in society) kept people in these groups from dignity, advancement and success, artificially over-valuing contributions has a similar effect. When a male boss says, “Wow, Kathleen, you did a spectacular job collating and stapling this report!” The effect can be to undermine the importance and even decrease the quality of all the other work this employee does.
Another example of patronizing a marginalized community comes from a TIME article by activist John Cloud that writes about a Supreme Court case legalizing gay sex (at a time when many states still had laws forbidding intercourse between men), “It was sweet of Justice Kennedy to say gays can now ‘enter upon [a] relationship in the confines of their homes … and still retain their dignity as free persons.’ Gays have found their own dignity through decades of refusing to hide. For the court to come around, at this late date, to acknowledging our existence as ‘free persons’ is shockingly patronizing; it’s condescension that has been cast as liberation.”
So is the answer to clam up? To guard against undervaluing or patronizing marginalized people by having no interactions at all? Of course not. Even active bullying has some advantages over this quiet form of marginalization.
“Bullying and overt forms of rejection still provide the individual with a sense of recognition and importance. Others must go out of their ways to bully, to overtly reject, and this expended effort alone is substantiation that one deserves recognition. However, another aversive interpersonal behavior deprives the individual of the sense of recognition and meaning: being ignored and excluded,” writes a study in the Cambridge University Press.
Or maybe the answer is to relate as best we can as if race or gender or sexual preference or another marginalizing factor were non-existent – as if we are blind to these characteristics or have moved beyond them? Unfortunately, your subconscious has other ideas and will out you (to borrow a loaded term), in the form of microaggressions. Yes, we’re talking the same microaggressions that we hear so much about – from people advocating for marginalized groups and from those in majority populations who think the “political correctness” debate has gone too far. But imagine living with the tide of small, comments (“My dog’s name is Simba, too,!” writes Simba Runyowa in the Atlantic, describing a college friend’s reaction to his name), or simply the heightened awareness of sitting next to someone in a public space whom you recognize is different than you. Pretending as if we have moved past marginalization leaves bias festering in the subconscious – and too often bubbling to the surface when we least expect it.
No, the answer (if there is one) is not in praise or silence or the woke belief that we’re beyond race or gender – really, it’s not in any single kind of action at all, but in confronting these biases that underlie all our actions. Why do some male bosses patronize female employees? Because of the underlying bias whispering that female employees shouldn’t be expected to deliver the same quality of work as others. Why did the Supreme Court feel like it needed to offer dignity without, at the time, offering equal rights like marriage or the right of hospital visitation to the LGBT community? Because the Court felt like it could magnanimously bestow this dignity upon a group that had no inherent dignity of its own. Why do we seek to mute our biases? Because we recognize these biases still have a voice.
So give them voice. One thing you can do to confront marginalization is to work to move your biases from your subconscious to your conscious mind. In other words: Think about the things you believe and why you believe them. Did you grow up a certain way in a certain community that believed certain things about certain groups? How do your own experiences create your subconscious beliefs? When you see subtle discrimination that leads to marginalization, call it out – whether you are the one seeing a mistake, making a mistake or feeling the force of the mistake. Tell your story to others and provide a non-judgmental space where others can tell their stories to you. In classrooms and boardrooms and social situations, talk about marginalization.
“For marginalized youth, the transition to adulthood is a stage of life in which inequalities can be either magnified or reduced,” points out an article in the Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal.
Whether you are inside a marginalized community or working to be a force of empathy and dignity from outside these communities, don’t be afraid to be the light that shines into dark corners. Open your ears. Open your eyes. Open your mind.
And open your mouth.
It’s up to you to continue the conversation.
Garth Sundem is a parent, husband, and author of books including “Real Real Kids, Real Stories, Real Change”.
