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The concept of marginality was first introduced by Robert Park (1928) and explained, almost as a minor theme, in Park's analysis of the causes and consequences of human migrations. In his article, Park referred to a “new type of personality” which was emerging out of rapid human migratory patterns during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and how they would affect present and future relations between groups. The most interesting feature of this essay was Park's discussion of this new personality, which would be a “cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples … a man on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.” Edwin Stonequist (1937) probed the marginality concept more extensively than Park, but he highlighted the personality features of marginality and focused his critique into an assessment of the mental state of those marginalized. So closely allied are the views of the two that we can without distortion discuss their views as the Park–Stonequist model of marginality. It became the predominant model and a reference point for studies of marginality (Dennis 1991: 4) until Dickie‐Clark (1966) introduced the term “marginal situation” and moved the discussion from the personality of the marginalized to a more pointedly sociological reference point. Dickie‐Clark concluded that the Park–Stonequist model, largely Stonequist's extension of Park's early model, subverted and distorted the sociology of marginality by creating an exclusive model of the marginal who became permanently stereotyped as “irrational, moody, and temperamental.”

The concept of “the veil” has been used as a metaphor by many fiction and nonfiction writers to represent and describe individual and societal actions, values, and activities. More specifically, the term has been used to describe the covers, barriers, and shields limiting—and in some cases oppressing—the ability to see the individual self, or the society, in a clearer and more objective manner. From this perspective, the veil has been used to describe how social reality can be narrowed, skewed, and distorted. W. E. B. Du Bois was the first scholar to use the metaphor of the veil, as he had used other metaphors such as double consciousness, the color line, and masking, to describe the oppressive race and class inequities suffered by racial and ethnic groups in the United States and abroad.