This is sinister. The Global Majority sounds like a phrase invented by a deranged cult leader or the villain in a superhero movie.
In fact, it is the chilling jargon adopted by King’s College London and other institutions to separate white people from the rest of humanity.
Staff at the prestigious university were invited last week to sign up for free tai chi classes, to ‘tackle chronic stress triggered by racism’. But the registration form made clear the aim was to ensure that ‘the participants are all from global majority backgrounds’ (my emphasis).
A memo went even further. It stressed the sessions were restricted to ‘staff who identify as black/people of colour/global majority’ — a term for the ethnic groups which constitute approximately 85 per cent of the world’s population.
The implication was crystal clear: ‘No whites.’
NANA AKUA: ‘The Global Majority’ sounds like a phrase invented by a deranged cult leader
The language of racial segregation in British universities is spreading and is already being echoed in schools and civic organisations. Talk of the Global Majority is the latest and most insidious development. This system lumps together all non-white people — and I find it as frightening as it is offensive.
One woman in particular is to blame for this ugly phrase. Rosemary Campbell-Stephens, who seized on the phrase in 2003 and has trumpeted it ever since, is a black British academic, now living in semi-retirement in Jamaica. At an event for University College London (UCL) last year, she described herself as ‘an anti-racist, Pan-African paradigm shifter’.
A shameless egotist, Campbell-Stephens’s pronouncements would be comical if they weren’t so poisonous. She attacks ‘white people, primarily white men, who supposedly hold the social, political and economic power’ as an ‘elite minority’.
This minority, she claims, is ‘aided and abetted across the globe by those who are not white but want desperately to appropriate whiteness to share in the spoils’.
In other words, those like me — who happen to be black but who don’t detest all white people — are traitors.
‘The white elite,’ she adds, are ‘in their final death throes,’ but meanwhile, the ‘third world’ (her words) is ‘occupied territory created for the Global Majority’.
As if to prove satire isn’t dead, Ms Campbell-Stephens’s loathing for the ‘first world elites’ did not prevent her from accepting an MBE, a Member of the Order of the British Empire award, from the Queen in 2015.
Ms Campbell-Stephens later excused this hypocrisy by explaining she saw the honour as a tribute to her ‘activism’.
In her profile on the LinkedIn website for professionals, she declares her personal pronouns to be ‘we’ and ‘us’. She really imagines she is speaking for everyone who isn’t white — either that or she thinks she is Queen Victoria.
King’s College London ran an event offering tai chi classes for those facing racism
Incredibly, this woman is not only a visiting fellow at UCL, but her 2021 book, Educational Leadership And The Global Majority: Decolonising Narratives, is now required reading at Birmingham University’s School of Education. ‘I could not be more proud of my work at UCL,’ she announces on LinkedIn. ‘It was described as groundbreaking: I describe it as soul-shaking. I am rarely in my lane. I add value. I am.’
You might think the views of one obscure academic can’t have a major impact on society but last November, Westminster council announced it was replacing the acronym BAME (Black And Minority Ethnic) with her preferred phrase ‘Global Majority’.
BAME is a ghastly term. But Global Majority is even worse: even more militant and divisive, defining white people as the enemy of everyone else and clearly implying that even though white British people are in a large majority in this country, since whites are a global minority, their culture, history and world view should not hold sway here.
Like so much Left-wing orthodoxy, it is also steeped in anti-Semitism, because Jews are not included in this Global Majority.
I despise any system that categorises me by the colour of my skin. It is restrictive, destructive and belittling.
All my life I’ve expected people to judge me on my abilities and my force of character — and because I insisted on it, most people did.
Of course, like many others, I’ve experienced discrimination. But this is the way I see it: those who see me as inferior because I’m black are invariably too ignorant to be worth my time.
Now I believe some black people are worsening the situation — especially academics on ego trips, who judge everybody on skin colour. They preach this Global Majority theory, the obnoxious and ridiculous notion that everyone who isn’t white is automatically the victim of oppression.
I always warned that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) brigade would do immense harm.
The scale of the social damage is worse than everything I feared.
Author and educator Rosemary Campbell-Stephens MBE
Backed by the Labour party, the BBC, the social media vigilantes and even the police, BLM has spread the doctrine that white oppression is the cause of all evil: racism, war, poverty, everything.
Whites caused it all, it dictates, and however much they apologise, however deeply they are taught to hate themselves, they can never atone for their guilt. This is harmful to everyone — not just white people. It is also a calumny, one propagated by bitter zealots with their own agendas.
I have a message for Ms Campbell-Stephens: the only Global Majority I’m part of is the human race.
All of us are descended from ancestors who evolved in Africa half a million years ago.
That’s not a political statement, it’s basic anthropology.
I refuse to be defined by the fact I’m ‘not white’. To tell me I’m essentially the same as a Chinese woman, or an Inuit, or a Pakistani, or anything but an Anglo-Saxon, on the basis that my skin is black, is repugnant.
I spent some time growing up in America, where this pernicious ideology was already spreading.
The most humiliating day of all my school years came when a well-meaning teacher explained to the class that the black girls were descended from slaves and the white girls probably had ancestors who were slave-owners.
I was furious. Even at my age, I knew this was an ignorant simplification. It ignored the fact that some of my ancestors might have been slave traders themselves — many black Africans were.
But even if it were true, it has no bearing on who I am. And it should never affect how other people regard me.
The grim reality is that since BLM, this type of identity politicking is commonplace.
As a result, when I’ve visited schools to give inspirational talks, all too often I’ve seen self-imposed segregation. The black children hang together, the Asian children keep to themselves, the white children are with other white pupils. An atmosphere of mutual mistrust prevails.
My daughter confirms that this is increasingly the case at her school. And no wonder, if the curriculum is based on encouraging some groups to resent the others.
We are ingraining racism into an entire generation and I fear it will be impossible to eradicate.
The young are being damaged for a lifetime.
It’s cynical and callous of people to build their careers around promoting division, and then expect applause for it. They are perpetuating discrimination for their own narrow advantage.
People practice Tai Chi at the Bund in the morning on January 3, 2022 in Shanghai, China
Here’s my prescription for this madness. All terminology that divides us should be abolished.
The ugly word ‘BAME’, scooping people together into ‘ethnic minorities’, makes no sense. It defines us according to wherever we happen to be living.
According to its twisted logic, I am part of this lazy minority grouping because 82 per cent of Britons are white. But what becomes of my identity if I visit Ghana, where my parents were born? Suddenly, I’m not in the minority.
Does that make me a different person? Of course it doesn’t.
If I visit India or Japan on holiday, I’m in the minority again — but all the Indians and Japanese are not, until they visit the UK. It’s lunacy.
Ms Campbell-Stephens rails against the ‘wilful colour-blindness’ in British education, which she equates to ‘white ignorance’.
She is completely wrong. The only way to end racial inequality is to see and treat everyone as equal, regardless of their skin colour. Being colour-blind used to be essential for all people who regarded themselves as decent and tolerant. Now, apparently, it’s the badge of racism.
I’ll carry on being colour-blind and stand up to anyone who peddles racial division, whatever new jargon they invent to disguise it.
