Minority Report Part 2

As a minority, the Democrats feel like I’m their property – that for some reason, I should appreciate that they see me as an adjective:  [insert race, gender or orientation here].  The problem is that those adjectives don’t define who I am, as one adjective can’t encompass the entirety of a person. Furthermore, if someone treats you like it does (or if you treat yourself like it does,) you are no longer seen as a human, only that label.  A sixteen-year-old taught me that.

 One summer in high school, I had the prototypical American teenage job: fast food worker.  While there, I made friends with a biracial boy named Mark.  Being both curious and dumb, I asked him if he felt more like one race of the other – Caucasian or African-American.   He said he didn’t know.  Again being dumb, I tried to make it make it more clear what I was asking, so I asked Mark, when he looked in the mirror, which race did he see himself as.  That sixteen-year-old just shrugged and said: “I don’t see either, I just see Mark.”  *Mic drop.*  I have never forgotten it.  Mark saw himself as a person, not an adjective.

Years later, I became friends with a forensic psychiatrist for the government.  He was in his 70’s, gay, and gay studies was his field of expertise.  During one lunch, he confided in me that what bothered him about the gay community was that after they come out of the closet, they tend to leave that closet only to enter another. He was talking about how many in the gay community suddenly had their orientation become their entire identity.  In other words, these people were living as adjectives, not people.

Is it any surprise that most self-help gurus, like Tony Robbins, preach on living life without limits – whether the labels are placed there by others, or placed there by our own selves.  Henry Ford once said, “whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”  It’s pretty obvious that in order to be not only successful, but free, we need to live without labels and without restricting our views on who we are.  So then why do Democrats want to confine us to adjectives?  You’re black.  You’re gay.  You’re a woman.  You’re transgender. Why do they continually emphasize that that is our identity?  Because to them, that’s is all we are. An adjective. And as a minority myself, how can we live limitlessly, when the left is continually limiting us to a race, a gender, an an orientation?  It is not only suppressive; it is dehumanizing. 

 The American populace believing those lies is manifested all around us.  Minorities are much greater than the labels the left puts on us.  We are not adjectives; we are people. No label should limit you, and no label should define you. When the Democrats look at Mark, we know what they see.  When you look in the mirror, start seeing Mark. 

You can read Part 1 of minority report here.

Paul Leach is a professional writer and WGA member in Los Angeles. He has been interviewed in such publications as the New York Council on Cultural Affairs and the Huffington Post.