The Dignity of Pariahs

In her essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Hannah Arendt argued that the only legitimate attempt to emancipate Jews was executed by a rare group of “bold spirits” who required “an admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity, rather than a permit to ape the gentiles or an opportunity to play the parvenu.”[1] Arendt referred to these liberators of the Jewish spirit as “pariahs”, a term she borrowed from Max Weber’s description of the Jews as a “pariah people”, whom he defined as “a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization and characterized by internal prohibitions against commensality and intermarriage originally founded upon magical, tabooistic, and ritual injunctions.”[2] But the concept of pariah is not exclusive to the Jewish people, as Arendt points out, it is a “human type”.[3] Pariahs are socially, politically, and economically disenfranchised—outcasts who are often not even offered the “treacherous promise” of assimilation.[4] It is precisely this marginal location that gives pariahs their unique dignitas. The dignity of pariahs lies in their difference, their unique identity that resists assimilation. True emancipation begins when pariah people are admitted to “the ranks of humanity” as pariahs; that is, when their difference is accepted and preserved.

Nelson George’s recent article in The New York Times about the emergence of  a possible “New Black Wave” of film, highlights a new group of “bold spirits” who are seeking to deconstruct the monolith of black identity by turning their lenses on the outcasts at margins of blackness. These new film directors are emancipating African-American cinema that has been dominated by blaxploitation and hood films over the last forty years and has marginalized many in the African-American community who do not fit the normative cultural mold. One of these new directors is Dee Rees, whose recent film Pariah has drawn wide media attention and may be in the running for an Oscar nomination in the ingénue category. The film focuses on the experience of a young black lesbian who finds herself an outcast in her own family and denied a place in black America. Adepero Oduye plays Alike, a 17-year-old girl who struggles to come to terms with the incongruity of her sexual and racial identities. She can be African-American or lesbian, she is told, but she cannot be both. She is offered the “treacherous promise” of assimilation, but she chooses emancipation instead.

Alike’s poem in the film captures what I consider to be the hallmark of pariah dignity: the courageous ownership of difference, “Heartbreak opens onto the sunrise/for even breaking is opening/and I am broken/I am open/See the love shine in through my cracks/See the light shine out through me/My spirit takes journey/My spirit takes flight/and I am not running/I am choosing.” Pariahs are broken open by their exclusion, and their identities are constructed in the event of this disenfranchisement. Their brokenness gives birth to a consciousness of their unique difference, and the opportunity to own it. When pariahs take ownership of their identities they develop the courage to choose to be who they are, in spite of social, political, and economic disenfranchisement. They become “bold spirits,” who reject assimilation and seek emancipation from the shadows, and a place in the human family as pariahs.