They need a new word for "minority"

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I was reading a Yahoo! headline about schools, and I noticed that there were a few that listed "minority" students as making up more than half of the school. Right there, that's nonsensical. But on top of that, I think that when they give figures for "minorities," they're usually including only racial minorities, aren't they? So what about everything else? Religious minorities? (And is there a religious "majority"? Would that be Protestants?)
Plus, there's always talk about how Hispanics are going to be the largest ethnic group in the US within not too long, but when there are "race" options in polls, there's a whole complicated bit with Hispanics being white or non-white, and the regular "white" option specifies "non-Hispanic." (And what, exactly, does that mean? It's language-based, right? Does it mean a Spanish-speaking person? Or a person whose native language is Spanish? Or something else? Since "native language" is generally defined as "the language in which your mother sang to you as a baby" somebody doesn't even have to be able to speak their own native language.) But that means that in order to belong to a racial "minority" someone doesn't even have to look different than the "majority" that isn't a majority anyway because most people don't belong to that majority. Heck, I've known "white" "Arabs." (Since all "Arab" means is "person with Arabic-speaking parents.")
Usually being within the "majority" implies being a gentile too, but since most American Jews wouldn't consider themselves "middle eastern" the "white" option is usually the most descriptive on race polls, even though genetically that's not particularly accurate.
There was a question here recently about whether aspies are a minority.. which opens some more doors, too. Are people with intelligence outside the range of "normal" a minority?

Anyway, there are very few people who are not in some "minority" or another, so using the word "minority" makes absolutely no sense. Somebody seriously needs to come up with a better word for "completely normal person who differs from some totally objective definition of normal that nobody fits into anyway." It seems to me that "minority," as it's generally used, means "someone who is not white OR who is a white Hispanic."

Better terminology is seriously needed.

minority(noun)
1.a. The smaller in number of two groups forming a whole.
b. A group or party having fewer than a controlling number of votes.
2. a. A racial, religious, political, national, or other group thought to be different from the larger group of which it is part.
b. A group having little power or representation relative to other groups within a society.

The use of minority is not just 1.a, Maggiedoll. You are correct that it depends on who is using the term 'minority' as in 2.a. Mostly it is used in the sense you are discussion as 1.b and 2.b.

You got it.

Plus, just what exactly the minority group actually is depends on the locality being referenced.

A national minority could be the local majority.

I like the "Native American" thing.
Being born and raised in Georgia makes you a native Georgian, right?
I was born and raised in America, so I'm a native American, right? I didn't immigrate to here from some other country.

But there is a "Socially Understood" connotative meaning to the phrase 'Native American' which is quite different from its literal denotative meaning.

Or is Native American not the same thing as native American, because N is not n?
But grammatical rules say that at the beginning of a sentence n has to be N.

So, just exactly how the bloody hell am I supposed to know which phrases are literal and which phrases are allegorical and precisely when which is which?

Gaaaahhhhh!

The leading cause of insanity is language.

The most peculiar thing about the term 'Native American' is that the group of people being referenced by that term, were native here long before the area was ever called America. So shouldn't the earlier name for the area be used to describe them? Of course, that would mean having to break them all back down to their original individual tribes, since (as far as I know), they didn't use a specific comprehensive term for the entire continent. Of course, if you go far enough back, all humans on this continent supposedly migrated here from elsewhere, so there actually are no racial 'Natives' to this continent.

Making the only true 'Native Americans' those of us born here after the establishment of the current United States of America.

Or at the very least, those born after the use of 'America' to describe the entire continent had become common parlance.

Of course that would include as 'Native Americans' anyone born in South America or Canada, or any portion of the American Continental landmass. That's a lot of 'Native Americans'.

That's for sure!

That's even more confusing.. there's no single group with a controlling number of votes, nor is there a particular "racial, religious or political" standard that "minorities" differ from. If the majority of people are not of the "majority" group, how can people who are not of the majority group be a minority? Is the "majority" still considered white Anglo-Saxon Protestants? Especially having a president of a "minority," it's not like the so-called majority is in control.. And if you take religion into account too, then he's not even our first "minority" president, because JFK was Catholic..

Should whites in Detroit be given "minority" status and special treatment?

Do people deserve special help because they are black or gay or whatever?

Hey, you are discriminating against me because I am:

Black, white, gay, stupid, red haired, a communist, short, tall, fat, thin, ugly, left handed, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Scientologist.

We DEMAND that you hire more left handed fat gay black deaf oriental Mormons in wheelchairs.

I wrote a super long, detailed post and my internet froze. Blast it all.

I think you're making this a bit more complicated than it has to be.

If there's a class with ten people in it, and six of those people are white and the other four are black, the minority in the classroom is the black people. It doesn't matter if they elect one of those 4 to be the class president; there are still less blacks than whites, so they're still the minority. With religion, if six are Protestant, three are Catholic, and one is Muslim, the Catholics and Muslim are in the minority. If the black class president is a Protestant, he's in the majority for religion. If he's not, he's in the minority. Most schools just use race for the majority/minority categories; it's a lot easier than religion.

Expand that example to the US. Obama is black, and he is the president, but he's still in a minority group. If only minorities had voted for him, he would have lost. Same with JFK; if only minorites had voted for him, he would have lost as well. As it stands, however, people from both minority and majority categories voted for them. If every person from the majority category had voted for the opponent, that opponent would have won. So even though Obama is president now and JFK was before, the majority still holds the controlling vote.

As for whether WASPs are still the majority in this country - yes. 51.3% of people are Protestant, according to the CIA World Factbook. The next largest group (Catholics) only make up 23.9% of the population. As for race, 79.96% of people are white, followed by 12.85% who are black. However, this is a bit tricker, because Hispanics don't get their own separate category. There's a total of 15.1% who are split into every other category; however, even if you subtract all 15.1% (who are probably mostly identified as white, although some will be in other categories) from the 79.96% who are white, the whites are still clearly the majority. However, females are just barely the majority these days, at least in total; under 15 years old, there's more males, and from 15 to 64, it's an even 50/50.

Hispanics are defined by the US Census as a person of Spanish/Latino/Hispanic descendant, so it's not all about language. If your grandparents came over from Peru, but neither you nor your parents speak Spanish, you'd still technically be Hispanic. On the other hand, someone of German descendant who spoke Spanish fluidly from a child would not be Hispanic.

With the polling results - it's complicated, yes. I think the reason Hispanic is not usually listed is because it doesn't have a separate category in craniofacial anthropology (skull shape, essentially). There are three main groups there: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which correspond to white, black, and Asian. It's not foolproof (one of the famous tests in anthropology at University of Tennessee is a clearly Caucasoid skull that belonged to a missing black male), partly because people have mixed a lot over the years and might not know it, but it's not bad. There are subcategories, but those are even more shaky, and still none of them correspond to Hispanics. To be honest, the reason they include Native Americans and Pacific Islanders (who would have Mongoloid skulls, most likely) is probably because of the country; there's some pressure to recognize the native people. If you went to another country, they probably wouldn't have those options. So essentially, it's like having an option on the poll for European; it isn't actually a race.

For splitting it between white (non-Hispanic) and white (Hispanic), Hispanic only, and the word Hispanic not mentioned at all on the poll - I think that's a matter of not having a set way to deal with it, because so many people do identify as Hispanic. So some tests put Hispanic on it's own, others just don't mention it and let them pick another category according to what they'd identify with otherwise, and still others want a way to separate the Anglo-Saxons from the Hispanics but still don't want to put it as a completely separate category.

What the schools (was is the list of the top schools? I saw that on Yahoo! the other day and scrolled through to see if mine was on it, but nope) are doing is comparing the kids they have to the national average, not the internal average. They may have more black kids than everyone else, but they're considered minorities nationally. Beyond that, it's possible that the minority groups make up over 50% and are still smaller in size. For instance, if 51% of the school is composed of minorities, but 26% of those kids are black and 25% are Asians, the other 49% is still the majority group.

With the Hispanics expected to become the majority thing - what's expected to happen is that there will be more minorites total than the majority (like with the 51% minority, but split in the paragraph above), and Hispanics will be the biggest of that group of minorities. Indvidually, whites will still be the largest group (46%), with Hispanics making up the next largest portion, 30%. That's for 2050 and it's based on current statistics, so it's still quite possible it will change.

I love it when the population of females is referred to as a minority. More than half the population of just about any country is female.

ruveyn

I like it when they say "...discrimination against women and minorities." That includes everyone, since men are a minority!

I think the definiton they are using for a 'minority' for women is 2b.

2.b. A group having little power or representation relative to other groups within a society.

not 1.a. The smaller in number of two groups forming a whole.

Merle


minority(noun)
1.a. The smaller in number of two groups forming a whole.
b. A group or party having fewer than a controlling number of votes.
2. a. A racial, religious, political, national, or other group thought to be different from the larger group of which it is part.
b. A group having little power or representation relative to other groups within a society.

Seconded.


M.

How about the new word for "minority" being "cacapoopoopeepeeshire"??

Now do you understand why you are getting Moderator Warnings, history_of_psychiatry?

Merle
Moderator

But that still brings us back to the fact that the vast majority of people can be considered a minority by some definition or another.

I'll put in a vote for the bit about the leading cause of insanity being language. And time! I'm not sure which is worse, but time and time travel make language even more complicated, so they go together, too. (Was just watching the "Relativity" episode of Voyager..)

This all seems to me to be so much reaction from those who perceive in a dissipation of their own privilege.

By attempting to lump together all disadvantaged populations into a single amalgem, and thereby suggested that taken collectively they cease to be a minority, those who fall into none of the disadvantaged populations seek to demonstrated themselves to somehow be themselves disadvantaged.

It's an offensive approach.

-Men continue to outearn women in the workplace, and tend to hold a disproportionate number of leadership positions in government and industry.
-People of western european ancestry similarly outperform members of other national and ethnic origins.
-Heterosexual couples without children tend to receive higher levels of state subsidy than same-sex couples.
-Aboriginal people trail behind settler populations in almost every economic indicator

And the comparisons can go on.

To suggest that the white, anglo-saxon, protestant, heterosexual male is a disadvantaged minority is to completely belittle the experience of every disadvantaged population in our society. The face is that white, male privilege still gives this man a better chance of access to a greater share of economic prosperity from the moment of his birth.

As for nomenclature, I care not whether we misuse the word, "minority," or craft neologisms, provided that we do not, within this semantic exercise, lose sight of the fact that we are talking about people's access to their fair share of opportunity.