A technical examination of the term
The term Global Majority came up again last week. It was used quite glowingly, and it’s another of those terms that gets easy acceptance, promotion and defence without definition or examination of any serious kind. So let’s have a little go at its strengths and weaknesses.
Today I’ll propose a brief empathy for the receivers of the term, a purpose for inventing the term, an analysis, and a conclusion to help us all.
Empathy
I speak from a majority white country. People have become more race-aware, with truths and falsities abounding – about facts, implications, and attributions about global history and contemporary social impacts.
For some black, brown and indigenous people here, it is undoubtedly a comfort to consider the term Global Majority positively, and ally themselves to it. When you have been, and felt yourself to be, a visible minority, and have experienced poor treatment and/or heard about poor treatment of many others of your ‘look’, then it is natural to feel comfort, safety and kinship in a group of people with similar experiences. For this group to recognise that they are in a majority (globally) when they were previously told by the dominant discourse that they were minorities (because they were in a minority in their country, or the ‘West’) – the thought and feeling of being reminded of ‘I am part of the majority’ feels cool and refreshing. It confers strength, optimism.
For the group to have a name is also natural; for many the term Global Majority is an attractive name that conveys well a sense of being full partners in a society, even if it is a bit of a generality.
All good so far.
Purpose
However, we then come up against the etymology of the term, and it proves to be another child of Applied Critical Theory. It shows the same pattern as several other ‘Critical’ terms and concepts. Now, I love much of what Critical Theory has raised. It heightened awareness of genuine voids in the consciousness of the West with respect to ‘minorities’ particularly, and their experiences, with some sensible (liberal) and less sensible (illiberal, absurd) concepts and recommendations.
I added the word ‘Applied’ to Critical Theory above, to correct what I consider to be a deliberate falsehood. It’s my own term, used over a long period. I know enough of the literature to know that Critical Theory was never invented to stay on a bookshelf; it was ‘activist’ by nature. It was invented to shift, change, transform society – behaviorally and structurally. It’s never just ‘Theory’. I also understand enough to know that the movement uses and builds on postmodern concepts of dissolution to gain entry and power – a key one being the use of malleable language. A Trojan Horse. ‘Critical Theory’ sounds less threatening to prior power bases – ‘Critical Theory for Action’ would have been more accurate, but this is hidden. I get it, but it’s deliberately Machiavellian, not honest. But then, Critical Theory justifies accumulating power to itself, referencing Marx, and including eg Marcuse, 1965, Repressive Tolerance etc invoking power over ‘objective truth’. Beware!
So, what of the Purpose of the precise term, Global Majority? The invention of the term is credited to Rosemary Campbell-Stephens MBE in 2003. Her Applied Critical leadership development work in London looked to reject “Vanilla Meritocracy”; decolonize mindsets like BAME or ‘ethnic minority’; promote a sense of global authority in non-white populations; and decolonize Western values through ‘equity’.
For decent people this leads to two sides. One is to recognise Rosemary’s righteous calls for change of clear unfair perceptions and practices. The other is to recognise the sensible limits of system change, beyond which things get counter-productive for us all – black, brown and white. Too anti-Western and we are in the same mould as pre-Soviet, Nazi or Maoist calls to action, where the sympaths unwittingly enabled authoritarian power ‘for compassion and equality’. Those in power then jettisoned the enablers and this led to tens of millions of their own people killed – again and again through the 20th century.
Play with communistic ideals at your peril.
So, as per Critical Theory (which always = Applied Critical Theory!), the term Global Majority was coined to achieve practical, systemic, power-shifting ends, not just help a deserving group of people to feel good and improve things locally.
Analysis
We need to find the helpful middle ground.
Unfortunately for the vast majority of the world’s population, there are only 31 Liberal Democracies with functioning individual liberty and democracy for all, in a world of 195 nations (V-Dem; Economist Intelligence Unit). This is often called the ‘West’ with all its strengths and flaws.
The remaining 93% of the global population live in partial or full totalitarian states. Is that what the 7% should want for themselves? An inevitable question is, if we take the Global Majority founder’s words at face value and promote ‘a sense of global authority in non-white populations’, does that imply we in the West will almost immediately become totalitarian, as ‘authority’ and understandings of constitutional politics and power play out and average out internationally? What then enshrines, protects and promotes the freedoms that ‘ethnic minorities’ have and prefer in the West, alongside the difficulties? Yet following Critical Theory takes us to that place, whether we like to think so or not.
Now, if one argues there is no real liberty for ‘minorities’ in the West, then yes, let’s pull it down and average ourselves out in constitutional terms, globally. But I don’t think the majority of whites, blacks, browns or indigenous people in the West believe that or want that. There is indeed a choice to be made and to stand against Critical approaches where they lead to Marxism, while discovering and applying ways to improve.
Then if we strip back and spotlight the actual term Global Majority, what does it actually mean? I see the following issues:
- Unfortunately, and ironically, it only makes sense if it defines itself in terms of whiteness. If we split peoples’ melanin any further we end up with many groups of people defined by various shades of melanin. So it clearly means ‘those who are non-white, all together’. Once again, someone trying to de-centre whiteness creates a term that is based on whiteness, and it is also easily appropriated politically as anti-white rather than pro-anything.
- Once we split melanin or cultural types any further, these sub-groups often have little in common. Apart from being non-white, What does a Peruvian have in common with a Japanese? Are Kazakh women and Kenyan men closer in any cultural or kinship sense than my black mates and I? What is this Global Majority in any other sense than non-white? There is no common ground other than humanity itself, in which case you can then either include whites, or exclude and separate them under some criteria. I would not recommend the morals of that generalisation. We know how tribal people can be and should not encourage such splits.The Berlin Wall showed that people want plenty of individualism and freedom, not the disaster of forced-equality collectivism or tribal conflict. I saw behind the Iron Curtain three times and it was no joke – even or especially for the people it claimed to help the most. This direction would be a disaster for the West to choose.
Conclusion:
We should improve the West, yes, but not tear it down.
The term Global Majority was a signal to two groups of people at the same time:
a) well-meaning, empathetic folk for whom this feels obviously an exciting, affirming, helpful term; and at times indeed it can be;
b) committed activists who understand from Marx and some postmodernist-informed critical leaders that such concepts and terms provide ability (and cover) to gain more authoritarian power for themselves than group (a) or the rest of the population realise – by stealth, and with just enough truth in its words to gain acceptance and support.
Unfortunately, some empathetic folk and Applied Critical Theorists then add to the power game by applying ‘cancel culture’ power. Anyone opposing or even questioning any Critical approaches is a bad person, right? Such is the ‘totalising’, self-reinforcing, excluding element of Critical Theory. It’s a serious shadow side.
At the same time, some people of colour can say they lived a life of cancel culture or self-censoring! We want to improve that, and in some decades we really did. But it seems now we may be risking facing the worst of both worlds.
So, do good, empathise, support more vulnerable people, improve systems, but be vigilant to those who would co-opt you for more authoritarian, ambitious purposes.
What’s in a name, eh?