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by aestra 4597 days ago
The term minority has a specific meaning in sociology not the same that it means in statistics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_(sociology)

Rather than a relational "social group", as the term would indicate, the term refers to a category that is differentiated and defined by the social majority, that is, those who hold the majority of positions of social power in a society. The differentiation can be based on one or more observable human characteristics, including, for example, ethnicity, race, gender, wealth, health or sexual orientation. Usage of the term is applied to various situations and civilizations within history, despite its popular mis-association with a numerical, statistical minority.

Blacks were still the minority in apartheid South Africa, just not the statistical minority.

1 comments

Yep.

But in spaces like there, where people are unlikely to know things like that, it can be helpful to use terms like "margalized group" or "oppressed group", in order to stop a pedantic geek ( :) ) getting into a dictionary definition argument.