The rights of whites (in search of a majority)

Abstract

Like every concept, perhaps, the concept of minority can only function differentially. It is differential with regard to majority, of course, and with regard to other categories of groups, communities, or collectives, identified as minorities. The polysemy, and even vagueness, of the concept of minority, along with its distribution across a range of discursive fields, adds to its differential dimension as the word “minority” must relate to or carry a modifier. And modifiers of minority do run the full spectrum of minorities, beginning with number, of course, but also race, class, sex and gender, nationality, ethnicity, or religion, legal, social and political. And let us not forget age. Its ambiguities notwithstanding, minority always involved yet another differential, namely, measurement, though it was one that had to do with a certain quality (size, maturity), rather than with quantity per se. Is there such a thing as a minority, then? Is it not always already vanishing? What this essay describes as the destruction of minority seems crucial to recognize. It alerts us to a barely discernible condition in the age of minorities, to the possibility of there being no such thing as a majority, or else only under the figure of that minority which is not one, a minority that would appear as majority, effacing the minority that it itself is, while destroying “minorities.”