Disempowering Minorities: A Critique of Wilkinson's 'Task for Social Scientists and Practitioners'

Abstract

In this article, I examine Wilkinson's (2000) injunction that practitioners "omit entirely the `minority' concept" (pp. 124-25). I maintain that Wilkinson's argument disempowers groups--such as gays and the disabled-who have used a "minority" identity effectively, and speciously indicates that African-Americans would benefit from such retrenchment, thereby implying that social justice is a zero-sum game. Rather, "minority" coalitions are effectively pursuing justice for all. Moreover, Wilkinson's deconstruction of "minority" conflates conceptual breadth with conceptual vagueness, and conveniently ignores (or denies) the socially constructed character of "race" and "ethnicity." I suggest that practitioners learn more about the historical development of all of these concepts and honor clients who self-identify as "minority" group members, lest they become alienated from them. "I didn't raise my son to sit on the back of the bus. You get in there and fight for your rights." (from the movie Philadelphia, 1993) Continued attempts to connect, at any level, disabilities, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, economic position, and gender under a vague symbol is prejudicial and unreasonable. (Wilkinson 2000, p. 127, emphasis added) Why are so many people attached to their marginality and why is so much of their intellectual labor spent developing theories to justify it? Why insist on difference with such rigidity, rancor, and blindness, to the exclusion of the possibility of common knowledge and common dreams? (Gitlin 1995, p. 32) Introduction When, in the summer of 2000, I first happened upon Doris Wilkinson's article "Rethinking the Concept of `Minority': A Task for Social Scientists and Practitioners," I was excited to find that another sociologist was working on the meaning of "minority status." Just a year earlier I had done another literature search and found virtually nothing along these lines (from sociologists!). Based on the title, I eagerly anticipated a thesis that would "rethink" the concept. However upon reading the article I found myself frequently confused and disappointed by the approach taken by my esteemed colleague. While implying that her pursuits are "objective" (p. 115), Dr. Wilkinson here puts the activist cart before the analytic horse, leaving out crucial information that oversimplifies the issues involved and renders her arguments both errant and polemical. The result is a paper that misleads practitioners into thinking that the minority concept is always useless and/or harmful, when from the perspective of many pursuing their vision of social justice it most certainly is neither. All of this is not to say that I found the article entirely without merit. Dr. Wilkinson is to be commended for what is to me the central insight of her paper, which is to follow Nibert's (1995) lead in indicating that "the minority concept" can at times be obfuscating rather than clarifying. Specifically, Wilkinson argues that people often use the term "minority" when they mean African-Americans. This critique of euphemistic obfuscation is entirely appropriate: Practitioners, and the rest of us, ought always say what we mean. We ought not speak of "minorities" when we mean "Blacks." Dr. Wilkinson also correctly points out that there are important differences in both the historical treatment and current circumstances of the descendants of Africans in America, and that those might sometimes be ignored in a leveling of all groups under the rubric of "minority." To the extent that the excessive and liberal use of "minority" fosters ignorance of important differences between socially recognized groups, such problems ought be addressed, and Wilkinson does us all a service to point this out. (On the other hand, I argue below that that danger similarly exists in categorizing African-Americans with groups under the rubrics of "race" or "ethnicity.