Review: The Minority Experience

The Minority Experience: Navigating Emotional and Organizational Realities

By Adrian Pei (InterVarsity)

“This was not an easy book to write.”

From this first line, the reader already senses the emotional pain Adrian Pei had experienced and still was under in addressing what minorities experience in American society. One particular difficulty was writing openly and critically about a well-known Christian organization.

Pei’s primary audience is minorities, or those who do not hold what he calls “societal power.” In this way, he understands minority status in psychological and not numerical terms.

Readers from the majority culture can benefit immensely from reading The Minority Experience, especially those readers desiring not to repeat the wrongs of the past.

Pei divides the book into two parts, perhaps mirroring his experience of being an Asian—American. Notice the exaggerated hyphenation, which pictures his description of being separated from himself. The first part records what minorities endure living among a differing majority. The second part points the reader beyond endurance to a new day.

Chapter Two is central to The Minority Experience. Pei uses the categories of pain, power and past to differentiate the minority and majority experience of the world, explaining how each group has a qualitatively different level of pain, a different relationship to power and differing pasts impinging on their respective presents.

Pei writes with transparency and compassion. For the willing reader, Pei is the needed optometrist.

Eric Black, executive director/editor/publisher
Baptist Standard