Minority

The concept of minorities has existed for over a century, and until the 1960s and 1970s the term generally referred to national or ethnic minorities in heterogeneous nation-states. In the 1960s and 1970s, the range of characteristics used to identify minority groups widened (e.g., gender, disability, sexual orientation), and the practice of defining minority groups primarily on the basis of power and status disadvantages became common. The focus on disadvantages is evident in the writings of Schermerhorn (1970), who argued that minority groups should be defined on the basis of relative size and power. A group disadvantaged with respect to both size and power, in Schermerhorn's definition, was a minority group, while a group advantaged in both regards was a majority group. A large group without power was referred to as mass subjects, while a small group with power was called an elite. In common usage, however, the term mass subjects is rarely used in the early twenty-first century. While elite is more widely used, it is usually employed in an economic and political sense without a direct tie to race, ethnicity, religion, language, or other characteristics commonly associated with minority and majority groups. It is, however, usually true that elites, as referred to in this sense, are members of dominant or advantaged racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups.

While it is usually true that minority groups are numerical minorities, this is not always the case, as is illustrated by the subordinate status of women in the United States and, until recently, blacks in South Africa. Although Schermerhorn's term mass subjects might be a more appropriate label for such groups, they are more commonly referred to as having a minority status, referring to their subordinated position with regard to power, status, and economic opportunities. Although over 80 percent of the South African population is black, the political system was, until the mid-1990s, completely under the control of a small white numerical minority (but a majority group in the social-scientific sense) since the country was created in 1949. Racial separation and discrimination were written into the laws at that time, and these laws remained in effect for forty years. In the early twenty-first century South Africa is a representative democracy, and the black numerical majority is in political control. Yet, in another sense, blacks still remain a minority group in South Africa, since the economic wealth of the country remains largely controlled by whites.

Another instance of a numerical majority that is a sociological minority group is women in the United States. Women make up slightly over half of the U.S. population but relatively few hold offices in the nation's higher political governing bodies (such as the U.S. Congress). Even at the start of the twenty-first century, full-time working women are paid only about 76 percent of the wages of similarly educated working men (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). Thus, even though they are a numerical majority, women have in many ways been relegated to a subordinate role in American society. Accordingly, they can be regarded as a minority group in the social-scientific sense.

A helpful way to think about minority and majority groups, suggested by Norman Yetman (1991, p. 11), is to consider minority as a synonym for subordinate, and majority as a synonym for dominant.