To Question the Power is to ‘Cancel’ It
On Arjun Appadurai’s ‘Fear of Small Numbers’
You’re a minority whenever you raise your hand in a meeting to disagree with the way the group is leaning. In that one political sense, as Arjun Appadurai explains in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006), a “minority” is “not an ethical or cultural idea but a procedural one” that surrounds the expression of dissent “in deliberative or legislative contexts in a democratic framework.”
But in another political sense, Appadurai also notes, minorities can be “social,” “cultural,” and “permanent,” aka “substantive.” An ethnic majority tends to consider itself a “whole and uncontested ethnos,” and it uses this belief to justify the sovereignty of the political nation—that is, it imagines itself as heading an ethnostate. The very existence of minoritized groups inherently challenge this national self-conception. The minority’s “small numbers,” Appadurai writes, expose the falsehood of the majority’s “total purity.” And “the smaller the number and the weaker the minority, the deeper the [majority’s] rage” at them. I think the reason for the heightened rage is that the existence of any outsider at all would present an equal conceptual challenge to the majority’s perception of their right to rule; so, the smaller the minority, the more disproportionately…
