It usually feels good to be part of the majority. There’s a sense of safety – and sometimes power – in numbers. However, there are plenty of times when being legion comes with negative connotations. It can also be downright disadvantageous, like supporting Manchester United at the moment or being a BBC licence-fee payer.
We can now add another, somewhat more hefty majority to the list most people wish to avoid being a part of: the so-called global majority.
For some time now, activists in Western countries have been pushing the term ‘global majority’ as a replacement for the term ‘ethnic minority’. The reasoning is simple enough if you are a simple person: there are far more non-white people in the world than white people.
It is clearly meant as an attempt to further the pursuit of social justice. We know the tired old trope: whitey colonised the world, strip-mined the resources, walked on the Moon and generally can’t be trusted. So now it’s time for the ‘global majority’ to have a go.
The main problem with this term is fairly obvious: the global majority are not all the same. They are made up of different ethnicities, nationalities, religions and cultures. In some cases, they are as suspicious of each other almost as much as they are of the whites. This is difficult to reconcile with efforts to use the idea of a global majority to promote a tolerant multicultural society.
In contrast, the term ‘ethnic minority’ works in Britain, for instance, because it refers to a certain reality. As much as some academics and media outlets in the UK might pretend Stonehenge and Hadrian’s Wall were built by a society not too dissimilar to modern London, the arrival of relatively small groups of people in Britain motivated by something other than pillage and conquest is a recent phenomenon – and still not as widespread as you might believe. What’s more, in a post-imperial, post-Holocaust Europe, where sensitivity about minority status remains at the forefront of national conversation, accurately naming ethnic minorities as such has allowed for protections and legal carve-outs.
The idea of a global majority cuts against social and legal reality. It flips the idea of the protected minority and the powerful majority on its head. Now, it is the white man who is cast in the minority. But far from being offered the same concessions as minorities, his power is reduced and he is expected to accept the terms of those now said to be more strong in number.
The ‘global majority’ is an entirely imaginary construct, deployed for cudgelling white Westerners. Yet it can only do so by robbing non-white people of their separate identities and – in assuming they only exist in opposition to white people – their agency.
The term’s unpopularity among the ethnic-minority groups it seeks to define is telling. A recent YouGov poll found that only 27 per cent of ethnic-minority Brits say the term is acceptable to them. Nine per cent say they like it. Just seven per cent say they have ever actually used it. Even immigrants who buy fully into British identity would likely prefer to be identified accurately, rather than as part of an amorphous global bloc.
Many minorities also recognise that re-framing all non-white people or migrants as members of a ‘vast external community’ risks fanning sentiments among some white Brits that ethnic minorities are not ‘really’ British. Seen through that prism, one can perhaps understand why so many are hesitant to embrace it, especially at a time when opposition to immigration is soaring. The UK is a relatively placid and tolerant place, but any migrant community is well aware of the danger rising tensions pose.
Campaigners attempting to push the new term imply that the acknowledgement of unique ethnicities – or anything beyond ‘white British’ and ‘everyone else’ – is regressive. But what is truly regressive is imposing the term ‘global majority’ on people who really don’t want to be identified as such. The sooner this absurd term is jettisoned, the better.
Benedict Spence is a writer based in London.
