every society there is a group of "designated victims," whom people create to "live off'

both economically and psychologically.13 These designated victims meet the society's

need for pariahs and people to look down upon in order to shore up its ideal ego. In

America, people of color and ethnic subjects, discriminated and often exploited because

of their race or their ethic backgrounds different from those of white Americans, are the

dark shadow of the American dream and the founding egalitarian principle of the nation.

 If trauma is fundamentally about the radically devastating experience of having

one's world irreparably fractured by an intrusive force that is beyond one's control, then

minority subjects, who are discriminated and denigrated by society, bear all the time the

overwhelming weight of such intrusive force. Hence, their traumas, which are the result

of constant stress and a prolonged exposure to the ever-present threat of oppression and

humiliation, are different from those resulting from one distressing incident. As Laura S.

Brown, in her analysis of the invisible psychic scar of the socially underprivileged, points

out by drawing on Maria P. P. Root's concept of "insidious trauma," there are

"traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or

threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and

spirit." 14

 I call the self of the traumatized "marginal" for several different reasons. First, by

the term "marginal" I refer to a feeling of disorganization and helplessness that traumatic

incidents induce in their victims. Traumatic catastrophes or conditions of life put people's

world off-kilter, producing a subjective sense of being alienated from the center of their

being. In addition, I also use the term "marginal" in the sense that the victims of trauma

are marginalized and occupy a degraded position in society as a result of their harrowing