Title: The effects of patronizing and marginalizing minority groups
Headings: Marginalization: The pendulum swings both ways
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Marginalization: The pendulum swings both ways
By Dr. Nathaniel Granger
Recommended read: “ Embodied racism”
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Content: The effects of patronizing and marginalizing minority groups
BLOG
Marginalization: The pendulum swings both ways
By Dr. Nathaniel Granger
Saybrook Forum, Blog, Human Experience, Social Justice
- Friday, April 05, 2013
To marginalize is the process of relegating or confining to a lower or outer limit or edge, as of social standing. Hence, marginalization is the social process of becoming or being made marginal (especially as a group within the larger society): “ the marginalization of the underclass” or “the marginalization of literature.” Although marginalization is often defined as the process of making a group or class of people less important or relegated to a secondary position, (e.g., when one class of people is grouped together as second class citizens), this article intends to illuminate the implications of marginalization at the opposite end of the spectrum—outer limit or edge—patronization. “The marginal man … is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic cultures…. his mind is the crucible in which two different and refractory cultures may be said to melt and, either wholly or in part, fuse.” ( Source: E.V. Stonequist)
Marginalization at the individual level results in an individual’s exclusion from meaningful participation in society. An example of marginalization at the individual level is the exclusion of single mothers from the welfare system prior to the welfare reform of the 1900s.