Everyone feels like an outsider

A good way to think about the problem that diversity theory tries to address is to imagine a big table with lots of food and drink and conversation. Seated at the table are people defined by themselves as invited and therefore as deserving the benefits of being in the room. Erving Goffman calls these people normal, and emphasizes that you can be normal in one situation but not in another. Excluded from the seating arrangement—or included in name only but excluded from the chatter and goodies—are all the less-thans, the wannabes, the disaffected, the uninterested, and the former but now discredited members of the party. All these uninvited people are serving the invited, or peering in through the windows, or seated at the table but otherwise quiet and reserved—like your disaffected colleagues who doodle at meetings or teenagers waiting to be excused. The invited listen only to each other and fail to register discussions among the serving staff, the second-rate group members, the excluded, and passersby. The people at the table are full-fledged members of their society—the others, because of some personal characteristic, something they once did, or some gossip about them, are not.

Now, when you think of the invited, it’s natural to imagine yourself as not being seated among them. This is natural because we are all seated at some tables and unwelcome at others, but we don’t usually notice it when we’ve been seated—we don’t listen to those not authorized to speak, those by the door, and those passing by, so we don’t realize that we are the haves compared to those unheard have-nots. Also, when we have a seat at the table, there are hidden thoughts and past indiscretions which, if known, would disqualify us from full-fledged membership in the group, so even when we are normal, we don’t always feel normal. On the other hand, when we are marginalized, confined to silence or to service or kept out of the dining room, we see very clearly that there is a table at which we are not welcome.

Thus, for example, at the university where I work (as at all universities, I’d guess), faculty members who don’t have tenure are obsessed with getting it. From their vantage point, the tenured faculty members are all Jabba the Hutts, fatcats enjoying their privileges and comforts. They see tenured faculty, in fact, as staff sees them—but they don’t notice the staff’s envy and resentment, only their own. Tenured faculty take their own status as a matter of course. They have forgotten what it’s like not to have tenure, because not having tenure is a stigma (a characteristic that keeps one from being a full-fledged member of a group), and once a stigma is removed, the last thing a full-fledged group member wants to do is to remind the group that he was once less than full-fledged. If it comes up at all, many tenured faculty act as if there was never any question of whether they’d get tenure. Untenured faculty are called assistant professors. With tenure comes a promotion to associate professor. Eventually, one can apply for a second promotion to become a full professor. The typical associate professor is much more aware of not being a full professor than she is of being at the tenured table. God only knows what the full professors worry about—people not reading their blogs, I suppose.

The same thing happens in families. Parents forget what it was like to be a child. Childhood in many situations is a stigma that keeps one from being a full-fledged member of any group that includes even one adult or older child. (In fact, full-fledged means having the feathered wings necessary to fly with the flock.) If you ask a Latina single mother of two when she is at the table and when she is not, will she flash on the fact that she spends eight hours a day as the only person in her home authorized to make decisions? Or will she think of the insult she received from some bus driver who assumed she was not getting off at the university? In other words, her experience of not being a full-fledged student will loom larger for her than her experience of being a full-fledged member of her little family because we’re always more aware of being stigmatized than we are of being normal. Indeed, that’s just what normal means, isn’t it? You don’t notice normal weather, normal driving conditions, or normal television reception. And you don’t notice your membership in a group when you’re normal in it.

Author: Michael Karson, Ph.D.

Clinical Psychologist View all posts by Michael Karson, Ph.D.