‘You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame,’ sang my husband with execrable delivery. ‘No,’ I said, ‘You can’t sing things like that now. In any case, I was talking of Bame, not Mame.’
The hit musical from 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, has only the most tangential relevance to the latest lurch in approved terminology for what we were encouraged to call Black and Minority Ethnic people until that term was expelled from polite conversation. Now the trendy label is global majority. ‘The term Global Majority was coined as a result of my work in London on leadership preparation within the school sector between 2003 and 2011,’ says someone called Rosemary Campbell-Stephens. In a biographical note in her paper ‘Global Majority; Decolonising the Language and Reframing the Conversation about Race’, she says ‘her great love is speaking, whether as a keynote, in podcasts or dialogue about equity or decolonisation’.
The Oxford English Dictionary, however, cites examples of global majority from 1971 onwards, though it notes that in early use it was not a ‘fixed collocation’.
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