To Majority, Lone Voices Sound Threatening

A delegate to last week’s NAACP convention looked into the camera, cocked her head slightly to the side and smiled.

“You know, we’re not all alike,” she said, rather sweetly.

The reporter wanted to know about Clarence Thomas, President Bush’s pick to replace Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court. Was she inclined to endorse him or not?

But the question was more broad. An undertone dodged between the interviewer’s words. To me, it sounded like this: Come on. You’re black, aren’t you? So where do you stand?

Ah, but the delegate was not quite ready to choose her side. She wanted to know more about this man than the color of his skin. And that takes time. Insight doesn’t come as easily as polishing off a multiple-choice quiz.

Yet we persist with our instant categories. They’re convenient, innocuous, sloppy and dangerous, too. Check one of each: race, sex, religion and the amount paid for your car. Don’t worry if the sum doesn’t quite add up to who you are. We will all be squeezed into boxes just the same.

Never mind that in the process, our parameters shrink.

So what are we to make of Clarence Thomas, a sharecropper’s grandson who has risen to a place populated mostly by those pale of skin? Questions are being raised. Thomas doesn’t fit very comfortably into a prefab box.

Is he a success or a sellout? Is he black or white inside? Is he one of us or one of them ? Pressure groups are asking what they must: Please, sir, state your side.

This is how the game of public affairs is now being played. Only the game, increasingly, isn’t very nice. It’s looking more and more like war.

Everybody must pick a side--on civil rights, abortion, school prayer, and on down the roster from there--and then we must do battle if, that is, we are said to have “any guts.” Sitting on the fence isn’t really an option anymore. You might get swept off, or impaled.

Because the majority rules. Sis-boom-bah. We’re No. 1! And the majority can scare.

The Silent Majority. The Moral Majority. The Feminist Majority. Never mind that the majority seems to be always up for grabs; never mind that nobody’s figured out who is doing the count. Just remember that majority is steamroller power, a bandwagon that Americans love to get on.

Lone voices, now more than ever, are decidedly uncool. In America of the 1990s, they tend to sound more like howls. Whiny and desperate, they grate on The Majority’s nerves. Hasn’t anybody told them? Democracy is no longer synonymous with dissent.

I am sad to say.

Last week, the trial of four gay-rights activists accused of disrupting a speech by Rep. William E. Dannemeyer came to an end in Orange County Municipal Court. The alleged crimes took place at a seminar held in an Anaheim church, after the activists had paid $50 each to attend.

One of the protesters had his charges dismissed, a married couple was acquitted and the fourth defendant was convicted of a misdemeanor count of disturbing the peace, fined $100 and given a year’s informal probation.

The Rev. Louis Sheldon, of the Traditional Values Coalition, had put the activists under citizen’s arrest when one of them began reading from the Bible while Dannemeyer had the floor. The others unfurled a sign. “Pray to End Gay Bashing,” it read.

The judge in the case said he felt that if the sign had shown support for the majority in the group, there would have been no arrest.

And no case. And no taxpayer dollars spent for a trial.

But the majority rules.

Henry Truong, a 19-year-old student at Orange Coast College, wrote me a letter the other day. Henry arrived in this country on May 2, 1975, with his family from Vietnam. Henry was 2 at the time.

“The main purpose of this letter is to thank every soldier who helped the Vietnamese refugees to freedom,” Henry writes. “I keep on thinking if I weren’t transported by that helicopter to the United States where I would be now. There are many refugees who just want to get educated and better their future here for themselves and other people. And there are those who just don’t understand what it means to be in such a country.”

Except Henry tells me that he understands. He calls this country paradise. I believe that for Henry, this is true. He is very thankful that the United States has taken him in.

“My father always tells me to not be a part of the minority but blend in with the majority of society,” Henry writes. “That way, you’ll stay out of trouble.”

Henry’s father is right. For better and for worse.