Life & Wisdom Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Brooks is needling a word that pretends to be neutral while quietly arranging people into a hierarchy. “Minority” reads like math, like census bookkeeping, like a tidy descriptor you can put on a form and move past. Her point is that the term doesn’t merely count; it ranks. In everyday English, “minor” is smaller, lesser, subordinate. Once you attach that logic to human beings, you smuggle in a conclusion before any argument begins: some people are, by definition, secondary.

The intent is corrective but also protective. Brooks came of age in a 20th-century America that loved euphemism when it didn’t want to face power. “Minority” is the kind of language institutions reach for when they want to acknowledge difference without naming dominance: it shifts attention away from who holds the center and places the burden of “being different” on those pushed to the margins. The subtext is blunt: stop describing communities as deviations from an unspoken norm (read: white, affluent, mainstream) and start describing the structure that makes them precarious.

As a poet, Brooks is especially attuned to how a single term can compress an entire worldview. Her critique anticipates later fights over “people of color,” “marginalized,” “minoritized,” and “global majority” - attempts to swap static identity labels for language that points to process and power. She’s not denying demographic reality; she’s refusing the moral reality the word tries to sneak in. In Brooks’s mouth, “minority” becomes what it often is in practice: a soft word for a hard inequity.