All This Talk . . . Of Margins

I am grateful today for a phone conversation with my friend Jenny, and for clarity. Clarity comes and goes in these trying times, but I appreciate any I can get. 

All this talk, all this writing about being marginalized brings me back to where I started. I am not part of a group that has been regularly marginalized, some for centuries. I know the toll and the pain of the smaller ways I have been made to feel less important, the ways I have minimized someone else’s existence.

I am not excusing or minimizing what has been done to me and by me, but I want to widen the scope. My writing leads me to clarity and to furthering my understanding of a new concept my head and heart are trying to wrap themselves around.

Until recently, I had never directly written about marginalization. Only in recent years have I heard the concept of white fragility and pondered it. Only in the last months have I took a look at white privilege and what it has meant for the generations that came before me, my generation, and the young people growing up today. 

Because I took a dive into what marginalization means in my own head and heart, I surfaced with a stronger awareness of the many ways marginalizing holds us all back, whether we are the marginalized or marginalizer.

Wide margins are a good thing for cancer patients coming out of surgery, and a source of pride for victorious sports teams. 

They are not a good thing when considering the fractured discourse going on in my home country right now over so many things:  equality, wearing masks, candidates in upcoming elections, how and when students should return to school and athletes return to playing fields, anti-racism, police forces, and more.

Wide margins in public discourse mean the common ground, the sensible middle, are further away and harder to attain. Am I hanging out on those wide margins with like-minded people judging the folks on the other side, or am I speaking up with compassion as I take steps toward the other side?  The latter is the only way to get to the sensible middle.