Apologies for not having the time to engage more substantively with your post, but before this term starts spreading as the fashion of the day, can someone explain to me, given that there are countless ways to divide the global population into a majority and a minority, why does it makes sense to privilege the white/non-white divide and call non-whites “the” global majority, with the implication that whites are “the” global minority? Are you basically saying that of all the possible differences between people in the world, this is the most important one, and therefore deserving of “the”? And how is anyone supposed to know that’s what you’ve decided to do, when first encountering this term?
No need to apologize. It’s just a shortform, and I have enough cognitive dissonance on the topic to not be really sure what I think about it myself.
I agree with you that the phrase “people of the global majority” sounds weird and naively seems to divide people into unintuitive groups unnecessarily. But in my post I was talking about friends that I personally know who have been hurt by things the EA movement has said in some introductory social media spaces, and their preferred name as a group is “people of the global majority”. By using it, I’m merely using the term they’ve taken for themselves, because it doesn’t seem to hurt anything and it generally is nice to use the names that people have adopted for themselves.
Their reasoning for using “people of the global majority” is that:
“people of color” is too US-centric;
it centers whiteness as the norm;
it implies that white folks are devoid of race; &
many people may not identify as POC as it’s a U.S. social and cultural construct that does not translate universally.
I believe that they find it empowering to identify as a larger group. Personally, I’ve always felt more empowered by being considered part of a smaller group, but I believe they would say that that is a another example of my privilege. Since it does no obvious harm to call them what they want to call themselves, that’s what I do.
You also asked “how is anyone supposed to know that’s what you’ve decided to do, when first encountering this term?” To that, I don’t really have a good answer. I found the term BIPGM (black, indigenous, or person of the global majority) to be really unusual when I first came across it. It seemed to me to be another example of this new generation naming things unnecessarily differently. But it’s not any worse than what LessWrong does, where decades-old concepts are re-named in favor of whatever Yudkowsky titled it in the sequences. As weird as it may seem on first hearing the term PGM, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be used when talking about specific people who themselves prefer that term to be used.
Apologies for not having the time to engage more substantively with your post, but before this term starts spreading as the fashion of the day, can someone explain to me, given that there are countless ways to divide the global population into a majority and a minority, why does it makes sense to privilege the white/non-white divide and call non-whites “the” global majority, with the implication that whites are “the” global minority? Are you basically saying that of all the possible differences between people in the world, this is the most important one, and therefore deserving of “the”? And how is anyone supposed to know that’s what you’ve decided to do, when first encountering this term?
No need to apologize. It’s just a shortform, and I have enough cognitive dissonance on the topic to not be really sure what I think about it myself.
I agree with you that the phrase “people of the global majority” sounds weird and naively seems to divide people into unintuitive groups unnecessarily. But in my post I was talking about friends that I personally know who have been hurt by things the EA movement has said in some introductory social media spaces, and their preferred name as a group is “people of the global majority”. By using it, I’m merely using the term they’ve taken for themselves, because it doesn’t seem to hurt anything and it generally is nice to use the names that people have adopted for themselves.
Their reasoning for using “people of the global majority” is that:
“people of color” is too US-centric;
it centers whiteness as the norm;
it implies that white folks are devoid of race; &
many people may not identify as POC as it’s a U.S. social and cultural construct that does not translate universally.
I believe that they find it empowering to identify as a larger group. Personally, I’ve always felt more empowered by being considered part of a smaller group, but I believe they would say that that is a another example of my privilege. Since it does no obvious harm to call them what they want to call themselves, that’s what I do.
You also asked “how is anyone supposed to know that’s what you’ve decided to do, when first encountering this term?” To that, I don’t really have a good answer. I found the term BIPGM (black, indigenous, or person of the global majority) to be really unusual when I first came across it. It seemed to me to be another example of this new generation naming things unnecessarily differently. But it’s not any worse than what LessWrong does, where decades-old concepts are re-named in favor of whatever Yudkowsky titled it in the sequences. As weird as it may seem on first hearing the term PGM, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be used when talking about specific people who themselves prefer that term to be used.