Laos, February 7, 2006

"Minority"..to this American the word itself produces a cringe. A word offensive in nature for it has the tendancy to segregate with or without cause.

Upon hire to an organizatioin, a new employee must fill out an application where the "minority" must specify their "minority status". In the second section of the application one must specify their color.

Even as a "minority" Director of Human Resources this "required" category in the employment cycle has always bewildered and angered me for it suggest that we who fit in this category are "less, fewer, not holding power" than the majority.

Minority Definition:
"The smaller in number of two groups forming a whole.
A group or party having fewer than a controlling number of votes.
An ethnic, racial, religious, or other group having a distinctive presence within a society.
A group having little power or representation relative to other groups within a society. "

Why must we document who we are, where we're from, what color our skin is? We preach equality, yet the required categorization does little to imply such a universal concept.

Yet in Laos, there is a "Minority" as they are announced and defined. They are the tribes of the land, the one's that have existed for centuries in small villages, holding power and wealth from the land.

In Laos, I find the segrated class again..the class called "Minority". They can easily be categorized by who they are, what their color is and where their from. You can argue that they would consider their "minority" group to be Asian or Laos first and foremost, yet they do not. Modern society has placed them in "minority" groups by color, yet I do not know if they consider themselves "of color" or if they just consider themselves as just humans.

I visited and trekked through Loas on "Minority" tours... I was not looking for a lesser group, a small group, with distinct color, features, personalities. I did not find people who did not hold power, I did not find a group that ethics were different than mine.

What I did find was several distinct cultural empowered humans that maintain their lifestyle as they did hundreds if not thousands of years ago. They are hunters, weavers, keepers of nature. They are believers of "spirits" and "gods". They bestow value in family first and nature second.

In many ways, they are the makers of life as we know it, simple and true to their own culture.

As I shake my head by the "minority" definition...their status in this category grows for "humanity" has slaughtered the animals of the jungle for skins, chopped down the trees in their nature, taken most of the resources they live off and with each destruction their power and population dwindles. In a land that they ruled, they have been relocated to smaller settlements, their power to grow their crop has been outlawed and slowly, they have become the "minority".

As I travel through the "Minority" groups, I no longer resist the urge to ignore the box on the application that makes me "lesser in power" for my soul will define my strength, not a box on a piece of paper.