The myth of the global majority

“You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame,” sang my husband with execrable delivery. “No,” I said, “You can’t sing things like that now. In any case, I was talking of BAME, not Mame.”

The hit musical from 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, has only the most tangential relevance to the latest lurch in approved terminology for what we were encouraged to call Black and Minority Ethnic people until that term was expelled from polite conversation. Now the trendy label is global majority. “The term Global Majority was coined as a result of my work in London on leadership preparation within the school sector between 2003 and 2011,” says someone called Rosemary Campbell-Stephens. In a biographical note in her paper “Global Majority; Decolonizing the Language and Reframing the Conversation about Race,” she says “her great love is speaking, whether as a keynote, in podcasts or dialogue about equity or decolonization.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, cites examples of global majority from 1971 onwards, though it notes that in early use it was not a “fixed collocation.”

I find the concept of a majority undefined by any common feature rather hard to grapple with. If you started with the Ainu, an ethnic group indigenous to Japan, then everyone else is the global majority, including poor white folk. Quite a lot of people are Africans, but the global majority aren’t. The same goes for people of Chinese heritage.

There used to be a way of referring to the dead as the majority. “This Mirabeau’s work then is done,” wrote Thomas Carlyle. “He has gone over to the majority.” Sometimes they were called the silent majority, a phrase more often used now of those who, unlike the vocal minority, find their great love in something other than speaking. I remember being told that more people are alive today than had ever lived before, but that is not true. If there are 8 billion or so people alive today, more than twelve times as many have died.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2024 World edition.