This week, I read the chapter “United” in Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. It’s the next reading we’ll discuss in one of my classes. Interestingly, this is not the first time I’ve encountered the book. I received it as a gift two Christmases ago. It was also coincidentally assigned in one of my Asian American CAST courses last year. There’s a lot to unpack in Hong’s narrative. What stands out to me, other than her being an Oberlin alum, is that she defines an experience that for me has been previously unspeakable. Not unspeakable in the way that I felt I could not talk of it, but unspeakable in the way that I never found the right words to articulate it.
Hong defines this experience as “minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head” (55). Hong goes on to say, “When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to radicalized behavior…” (57).
Minor feelings came up for me a few days ago when I was on spring break and walking my family’s dogs. A neighbor begins talking to me, asking if I am part of a service that walks dogs. When I say no, he throws out guesses, the ways in which I could possibly know the owners. I am, ironically, one of the owners. I also did not start a conversation with this man but unfortunately had to say something to him. Because I am familiar with questions like these, cloaked as naive innocence, I also know that the seekers are looking for particular answers. I simply told him that I grew up with my dogs. Upon hearing this, he shrugged and said a touch defensively, “Oh, I didn’t know.”
I grew up in the neighborhood where I walked my dogs and have lived there for about two decades. I attended and graduated from the K-8 school three blocks away and played in a local softball league for six years. My parents were in the PTA and attended the obligatory fundraisers. I received my First Communion, took Sunday School classes, and was finally Confirmed at the local Lutheran Church. I have also helped walk my dogs since they were young, accompanying an adult as a kid, but then taking the eldest out by myself once I got bigger. I was old enough to walk the youngest alone when he came into our lives. Suffice to say, my participation in the community was not and has never been unknown. But despite all of this, a neighbor still assumed that I must have been part of a dogwalking service. Incidents like this happen to me more frequently than I would like. There's an assumption that since I don’t look like the people around me I must not belong or I should fit into a stereotypical category. If I do belong, it must be because I work for someone else. This kind of racism evoked in me minor feelings, the long-term frustration with the way things are and have always been. Even people who do not admit they are racist or would not identify as such perpetuate instances like these. White members of my own family have reacted with anger and defensiveness when my sister or I expressed our own racial experiences.
I am writing this post and quoting Hong in the hope that at least one person who reads this can resonate with this experience in a way that is helpful to them. What you may read in class at Oberlin, depending on your courses, won’t just help you down the line, but could also apply to how you see yourself and the world today. Hong, for instance, read part of her book at Western Michigan University and afterward, hugged a distraught Korean American student who felt like she didn’t fit in. “It is for her,” Hong says, “that I’m writing this book” (30). Therefore, it is for you, that I am writing this blog post. At all schools, students are at the age where they are seeking their own sense of belonging. It may help to learn more about your identity through classes and books that challenge the status quo. Being assigned Hong, for example, allowed me to name what I couldn’t before.
