Marginalized

Living gratefully today, I give thanks for cool breezes and the smiles I know are behind the masks of friends. I can see the smile in their eyes. 

The word marginalized has been rolling around in my head for some time now. The killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day and the unrest since then brings many terms to the forefront. Systemic racism. White fragility. White privilege. Black Lives Matter. Anti-racism. Marginalized. 

Marginalized...seen as insignificant or peripheral, on the edge or outer limit. To marginalize is to treat a person or group as unimportant, insignificant, or of lower status. 

An acronym I am seeing and hearing often now, along with BLM, is BIPOC. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. BIPOC certainly refers to groups that have been marginalized for centuries in our country. We have some ugly history fellow Americans. The present has had some ugliness too. Can we use the pain and anger, the injustice and frustration, to bring some real change?  

That remains to be seen. I can tell you that I am personally changing as I have considered my own previous complacency and now my desire to better understand and more actively support anti-racism.

We understand more deeply and engage more fully when we relate, empathize. I will never know what it is like to be BIPOC. But I do know what it feels like to be marginalized. 

We have all been marginalized at one time or another. Made to feel insignificant, unimportant, excluded.

Maybe it was insignificant compared to what others have faced. Don’t minimize it though. It is there that we find common ground and unify behind worthy causes.  

Let’s each ponder this in our hearts as we consider our own life experiences. Where and how have I been marginalized? Give it some time. It may mean going to some difficult places, pulling up some unpleasant and uncomfortable pain. Pain that is rooted in someone else or a group minimizing our existence, our feelings, our humanity.

Go there. Sit there. See what you find. We have all been marginalized at one time or another.