Are you part of the “global majority”? I was surprised to hear that I am, after a sudden spike in the use of this novel term last year, which refers to British people like me – those of us who are mixed race, Asian or Black.
Coined by the academic Rosemary Campbell-Stephens in 2003, the term is being adopted across our society, from the BBC to the Church of England. Don’t say “Bame”, say “global majority” instead.
Yet, this week, a YouGov poll of ethnic minority Britons found that only a third had heard of the term, with just 7 per cent – fewer than one in 10 – ever having used it to refer to that portion of the British population that is not white. We’re being encouraged to use it, but only 27 per cent of ethnic minority Britons deemed it as an acceptable term.
Over the decades, we have most often been called “ethnic minorities”, because white British people continue to make up three-quarters of the population. Indeed, some 66 per cent of those polled by YouGov preferred this term as a descriptor.
The use of the term “global majority” seems to be intended to offer us an empowering upgrade. We may be part of a range of minority groups in Britain, but we would be part of an overwhelming majority if we did share a group identity with the 85 per cent of people around the world who are not white.
The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) had hoped it would “decentre” whiteness – yet there is no global ethnic majority group, unless you take the incredibly white-centred view of the world that all non-white people are a group of their own.
The experience of being Black British in Bristol is different from the experience of being Black in a Black-majority Caribbean or African country. The experience of being a Muslim in a west European majority-white country is different from being a Muslim in a country where Islam is the primary religion.
That is why so few of the 6.8 billion people in this supposed “global majority” will have heard anything about a term only used to talk about minorities in Britain and North America.
The reason we pay particular attention to minority rights and equal opportunities is that there are often greater risks of minorities facing prejudice or discrimination – sometimes direct, sometimes more subtle.
The global demographic is not relevant for equal opportunities (unless you are staffing the United Nations); only the national, regional or local demographic is.
For example, UK universities need to have effective equal opportunities strategies for British students – ones based on geography, class and ethnicity. To use the term “global majority” for Black and Asian British students, as if they form part of some abstract international group, would be simply confusing.
The term feels regressive despite its intentions, because British ethnic minorities – particularly those from a Commonwealth background – have placed a distinctly strong emphasis on their British identity. The writer Tomiwa Owolade has argued that it is important to understand that Black British people are as British as they are Black – often having more in common with other British people than with Black people in other regions.
The term “global majority” offers the opposite perspective – regarding third- and fourth-generation Britons as members of the diaspora, more “other” than British.
How we talk about ethnicity often changes over time. The idea of “political Blackness”, which helped to forge Black and Asian solidarity, made a lot of sense to pioneering anti-racism activists taking on the prejudices and racist violence of the 1970s. That had largely faded away by the time I was a student in the 1990s – most British Asians did not identify as Black. Being less under the cosh made that less necessary, enabling people to rebalance shared goals in tackling racism and discrimination while embracing the specific national or faith heritage of our parents.
A message of the Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests in Britain was the need to pay attention to specific challenges of anti-Black racism and prejudice. There was a shift away from the use of the term “Bame”, and the lazy way it seemed to lump all minorities together.
The trend in charities and academia towards adopting the term “global majority communities” takes the opposite lesson. Research shows that most people prefer simple and familiar terms: “ethnic minority” still polled best when British Future researched various terms in 2021.
Constant changes in terminology are often seen as confusing and distracting by those from minority and majority backgrounds alike. If there is going to be a change of terminology, it would be important to first find out how welcome that is to the broad groups of people it is trying to describe.
Sunder Katwala is director of British Future, an independent, non-partisan think tank and registered charity, engaging people’s hopes and fears about integration and immigration, identity and race
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