When asked to take part in this project, I did wonder ‘who is asking?’ And then I searched around a little and saw that journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer thinks the term ‘Global Majority’ is a ‘bit racist’.1
Why Global Majority?
The phrase ‘Global Majority’ emerges as a response and correction to minority/minoritised ethnic or otherwise, but it raises the question of the sample size and population. Minority compared to what or to whom? It is also deployed as a tactical fiction. Who is included in this ‘majority’? Well, maybe all of us in the end. What could be more majoritarian than that?
When thinking about racism in the UK, it is useful and important to have a phrase that links everyone who faces this racism. That doesn’t mean we are all the same. Or that we should never use more precise terms for communities or groups. But for all the times that the crude but useful binary of ‘white people and everyone else’ is being muttered or implied or talked around or avoided, I think it is good to have a descriptive and uniting term for that everyone else. At the same time, we need to understand that this is a particular and limited tactical need. It is not really a way to understand the world, and it is certainly not a way to change it.
One of the problems with trying to squeeze ourselves into racialised logics of categorisation is that our best efforts become tainted by the quagmire of race-thinking. In response to the structural racisms of imperial metropoles, we adopt a differently concocted alliance. You say we are racialised as less than you and are too insignificant to hold political rights or be noticed. We say that the experience of being racialised through the violences of colonial structures brings us together as the many on a planetary scale. Our gang is bigger than yours. Prove us wrong.
I should be clear that I am not against such playground taunting, Quite the opposite. For what it is worth, I think the performative hailing of each other as close kin is a delicious power move. But I think coding that kinship as a matter of race, however much we stretch the terms of racialised identification, leads us back into the endless circularity of blood, stock, and destiny. We might, as I have said already, want to say that we are the Global Majority in particular contexts for tactical reasons. But we cannot – should not – act as if we believe that our skin makes us who we are and what we can be.
Moving through Race to Reassert History
The project of the Global Majority makes sense only in response to the colonial and perhaps post-colonial logics of raciality. Without this implicit reference to the minoritisation of some groups of people – most of all those in movement or those trapped as internal colonies, often within the rich world – there is no global affinity through which to constitute the counter-majority. So I like the project, but I also twitch a little bit at this re-inscription of a kind of racialised category, albeit an extremely expansive one.
Despite my attraction to the term, it is also a kind of indirect acceptance of a Global North’s racialisation of the planet. There are many ways in which the human population of the world might divide itself into majorities and minorities: those who eat and those who worry; those who grab and hoard and squander the earth’s resources and those who must focus on staying alive. It may be understandable that we internalise the racialised categorisations of global populations that arise as part of colonial projects of dispossession, but using Global Majority as a proxy for racial naming also risks occluding other bifurcations of the planet. It is so obvious that it is barely worth saying that the real Global Majority are those who are dispossessed, made expendable, unable to plot the direction of their lives because access to the resources of life is expropriated and siphoned elsewhere.
Plate 1 of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Georgia Negro: A Social Study (1900)
The long shadow (and it is more than a shadow, isn’t it?) of the colonial means that the experience of barriers to the means of life at a planetary level is mapped onto something like a racialised logic. W. E. B. Dubois references the ‘colour line’ as the problem of the twentieth century in an address to the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900.2 What Du Bois was indicating with this phrase was not some mystical matching of skin, less still fantasies of a common ancestry, but rather the deep and continuing disruption and violence of the colonial order. The concept of the colour line is designed to conjure up the human consequences of colonial dispossession. The line is between coloniser and colonised. Racialised categorisation is just the mystifying vehicle that has naturalised these structures and histories. So the claim being made is not that we look alike, but that history has positioned us in ways that our destinies run in step. In fact, I think every defensible and honourable hailing of racial affiliation includes this recognition that affinity is not a matter of biology, it is a matter of shared or parallel experience and history.
In the face of the insistence on absolute, discernible, and impassable biological categorisation from our enemies, we can get bounced into misplaced defences of the underlying equality of multi-toned populations. We talk, far too often, as if we also believe race is both real and the unavoidable nature that orders the world. We end up whining that there is a place for everyone in our glorious difference, that we all have a place in this world.
Of course, that is true. But the tactical lever of thinking about the Global Majority is not to proclaim our equality in difference. The promise of the phrase, even if not always realised, is to take the referent of raciality and re-embed racialisation on a global scale in the interconnected histories of land and resource theft, non-sovereignty, and the whole long history of taking (everything) from some people. That is the monstrous machinery that weaves together the kinship of the Global Majority.
Yto Barrada, Tectonic Plate (2010). Wood and paint, 122 × 200 cm.
Choosing the Words That Let Us Understand the World as It Is
The term ‘Global Majority’ is a half-spoken echo of the traditions of South-to-South solidarities of what once might have been called Third Worldism. These are movements and analytic frameworks that have been committed to linking the struggles of the so-called metropolis to a planetary scale of dispossession. And I think that stuff is still worth saying, not because it is the final answer, but because it lets us (we damnés, we barbarians) see each other in a different – sometimes softer, sometimes more alluring – light.
My own preoccupations have tended towards examining how dispossession becomes, maybe has always been, a broader technology rather than a glitch that will be erased by effective economic development or improved institutional governance. The histories of colonial dispossession have saturated our understanding of resource theft, with good reason. There is a reason why the chain of association from resource theft to colonial violence to racialised categorisation to racialised subordination feels so commonsensical to us. But the world is so good at throwing up new horrors while the old ones still rumble on. The twenty-first century has taught us, not for the first time but still so painfully, that any and all human life can be made expendable. When we read the analyses of the segmentation of the world by imperial powers and believe, unthinkingly, that these modes of dispossession and depletion can only appear in the forms of racialisation with which we are most familiar, we are hiding from the full horror of our moment. We see the techniques of resource theft and organised violence honed through colonial endeavours repurposed into more mobile, less familiar patterns.
The old harms do not end, but the innovation in harming continues. And as this deluge of suffering continues, the geographies of dispossession extend, mutate, fray. What we have learned about the processes of racialisation helps us to see something of what is happening, even if it is not quite racialisation as we have known it. Yet some of the most ecstatic utterances against colonialism echo into our time: the dispossessed, the barbarians, the wretched. Each one is a call for us to see each other and our many intertwining connections. I wonder if the idea of the Global Majority, rather than a bifurcation of the world, could be a step towards understanding that this majority is almost all of us, if we could only better understand the terms on which that ‘us’ is made.