Global Minority

How and why formal equality dies

The idea of socialist society as the realm of equality…should now be overcome, for it only produces confusion in people’s heads.

-Friedrich Engels

Have you heard of the phrase ‘the Global Majority’, as a way of referring collectively to non-white people? It is likely that you have, and have - perfectly rightly - arrived at the conclusion that it is both foolish and actively malign. It is one of those ideas that is so manifestly ill-founded that it is actually difficult to even discuss it deploying the force of one’s reason: it possesses a kind of anti-rationality that deflects all analysis, criticism or even proper description. That in spite of its conceptual incoherence it still manages to insult literally everybody (the non-white people who it subsumes into an amorphous blob, and the white people who it dumps into the ‘global minority’ dustbin) is testament to the sheer power and intensity of the bone-headedness with which it is imbued.

In this post, then, I do not intend to spend a great deal of time spelling out what is wrong with the concept intellectually. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would instantly grasp that. The real question is: why do purportedly intelligent people talk about it as though it is helpful or coherent? Why do they, White Queen-like, insist on believing this obviously impossible thing before breakfast?

The answer, as we shall see, has two prongs. First, it goes a long way towards explaining the political meaning of ‘wokeness’ - a phenomenon whose origins we still struggle to explain for all that attempts to do so have become old hat. Why is it that the vision of a happy society which appeared to be coalescing in the late 1990s - one defined by formal equality (which is to say, equality ‘before the law’) and informal rubbing-along between people of whatever race, sex, creed or background - ended up dissipating with such rapidity? Why has it been replaced so readily by a re-animated racial (and sexual, etc.) hyper-awareness?

And, second, the answer also provides us with a lens through which to examine what I will, taking a slightly poetic license, call the ‘thought structures’ of global governance. We do not have a world government. But since the early 1990s a certain class of person has been busily imagining that we could. And the idea of the ‘global majority’ is an important, unacknowledged and to a certain degree subconscious aspect of that idea. To put it another way: global governance may have reached its high watermark with the reappearance of ‘strong gods’, but if it has not and becomes resurgent once more, the concept of the ‘Global Majority’ will become a central element of its governing style. This is because it is precisely the people who parrot the phrase most readily who man the institutions of the incipient global regime.

Let me begin, though, with the event which caused me to reflect on all of this in a substack post. The other day, a friend at a law school in one of the UK’s most prestigious universities (certainly within anybody’s list of a ‘Top 10’ in England by reputation) forwarded me an email from his Departmental EDI Officer (who is - I’ll get the punchline in first - a white British woman). The email reads, in part:

I’d like to invite all colleagues who identify as part of the Global Majority to an online meeting to start to explore the ways in which we can shape the Law Department to respond to the needs of all staff. I’d like to follow this up with a meeting in person a few weeks later.

For clarification, the term Global Majority is understood to refer to ‘all ethnic groups except white British and other white groups, including white minorities. This includes people from black, Asian, mixed, and other ethnic groups who are often racialised as “ethnic minorities”.’

I really am anxious not to post an inflammatory tirade, here, so I am being strict with myself in not inquiring into, e.g., what it means to ‘identify’ as part of the Global Majority rather than just being in it; what ‘other white groups, including white minorities’ refers to and what this means with respect to the position of British Jews in particular; how it can possibly make sense for my own mixed-race children to be in the Global Majority while I, their father, am not; why it is permissible to racialise ‘white’ people as a (global) ‘ethnic minority’ but not to racialise non-white people; and so on.

Instead, I would like to focus solely on the phrase highlighted in the quotation (about ‘responding to the needs of all staff’) and what it signifies. Now, I will grant you that academics are not always as clever as they purport to be. But there has to be some explanation beyond mere foolishness for how somebody who has successfully gone through 14 years of schooling, done an undergraduate and postgraduate degree and presumably performed well, and then completed a PhD, could convince themselves that having only the non-white people in an academic department get together to discuss ‘the needs of all staff’ would be preferable to having a meeting which was open to literally all of the staff. How does a reasoning human being manage to arrive at such a self-evidently absurd premise?

The short answer, of course, is that in the head of the email’s author, a meeting of ‘all of the staff’ would in some way cause the voices of members of the ‘Global Majority’ to become as it were ‘minoritised’ - and it is necessary for those people, therefore, to have their own separate forum within which to offer their opinions more freely.

But the subtext of is of course that members of the ‘Global Majority’ should simply have their views given more weight at the individual level than those who are not members of it. And this is really the very heart the matter: it reveals starkly the inegalitarian core at the heart of the ‘Global Majority’ concept. There are, within that concept, simply some people who are understood to be entitled to special treatment because of their race (or, more accurately, because of their not having a particular skin colour). Whereas everybody would be entitled to attend a meeting of ‘all of the staff’ (presumably such meetings still take place at the department in question), there is on top of that supposed to be an additional meeting or series of meetings which only some staff are permitted to attend in order that their views be better taken into account. This may or may not be justified (we are all familiar by now with the idea that ‘past discrimination can only be remedied by present discrimination’) but it - declaredly and self-evidently - rejects the ideal of formal equality per se. More than that: it predicates itself on such a rejection. It is unequal by design.

How are we to explain this, and what is its significance, given our purported contemporary obsession with everything equality-related?