Minority’s History: Tracing an Equivocal Social Category through the Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract This article traces the long career of the term “minority” in the United States, tracking both its continuities and its shapeshifting in the twentieth century American vernacular. I argue that the changing uses of minority reflected a protean politics of language that reflected changes in racial ideology across the twentieth century, which I explore by analyzing the evolving tension between ascriptive language and demands for self-description by Black and Latino Americans in particular. The earliest usage of minority as a social category emerged after the First World War, when Black journalists and advocates argued that African Americans needed protection as a “racial minority” in the U.S. Social scientists popularized a broader version of the term in the 1930s—which included immigrants and their offsprings—that held sway until a postwar shift in racial schema enabled second- and third-generation European ethnics to escape the minority category. The phrases “disadvantaged minority” and “underprivileged minority” gained currency around that time, entangling Black, Latino, and other “non-white” Americans in a shared but fragmented marginalized status. While the development of affirmative action policies in the late 1960s lent minority status an important form of leverage, the category continued to signal exclusions from the benefits of full citizenship. Even by the late twentieth century, members of groups labeled minorities still resided figuratively and often literally on the periphery of American society, a position from which many continued to critique and rework the language of minority to challenge its normative power.