Minority Populations: There Are More Than Meets the Eye

Minority Populations: There Are More Than Meets the Eye This précis contends that hitherto unnoticed minority populations, subject to an even more systemic and tenuous dynamic of domination, oppression, and privilege, have appeared in the wake of globalization.

The précis suggests that critical psychology can advocate justice-focused policy making better across an even larger constituency if it integrates concern for class, gender, race, and other identity categories more constitutively. The précis reasons that the existing and evolving institutional infrastructure of the United Nations System can help offset iniquities provided the binarism of realpolitik does not undercut far-sighted vision. Referencing Prilleltensky (2012) in particular, the précis flags core concepts at the intersection of critical psychology and globalization.

Olivier Serrat 28/09/2020

1 When they research the treatment of minority populations, critical psychologists look into the dynamics of how these groups have been affected by domination, oppression, and privilege; what organizations have been designed to support them; and what opportunities and limitations exist for them, especially in the educational, political, professional, and social realms. Inspired by emancipatory first-wave feminism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, gender began to feature in second-wave feminist discussions of power structures and social justice from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Because they shape the experience of all people, class and race are now also widely documented in research to situate inequalities. But, there is more: intersectionality, a framework that Crenshaw (1989) developed before the third wave of feminism began in the late-1990s, makes clear that social identities can overlap and has broadened the focus on class, gender, and race. Deleterious effects from the globalization that the end of Communism ushered suggest that intersectionality has an even larger role to play in minority population analysis.

Minority Population Analysis 1. How Do You Define a Minority?

A minority displays class, gender, race, and other identity characteristics that are not those of a majority. With origins in anthropology and sociology, the term "minority" refers in psychology to any population that is subjected to domination and oppression by others in more privileged social positions, irrespective of whether or not it is a numerical minority (Teo, 2014).

2. The Class, Gender, and Race Lens Class, gender, and race have been relied upon to characterize critical social issues impacting minorities: to illustrate, contemporary examples include communities working in poor or dangerous conditions in Bangladesh, Chile, the People's Republic of China, India, or Taiwan (officially, the Republic of China); women (across many countries); the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India; Tibetans and other non-Han populations in the People's Republic of China; the Maori in New Zealand; people living under authoritarian regimes; etc.

Class, gender, and race explain much but not all: other identity categories include age, career, disability, education, ethnicity, family size and composition, language, marital or relationship status, parent or childless, physical appearance, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status. Also, Crenshaw (1989) drew attention to the mutually constitutive nature of inequalities: to wit, identities do combine and beget additional modes of domination, oppression, and privilege that must be uncovered and explicated. Certainly, now that the world has been "flattened" by globalization, hitherto unnoticed communities of disenfranchised people have appeared (Friedman, 2007). In short, an even more systemic and tenuous dynamic of domination, oppression, and privilege is at play.

Globalization and the Multiplication of Minorities Globalization has created jobs and raised productivity, output, and wages in low- and middleincome countries, lowered the prices of products in high-income countries, and spread knowledge and technology to improve people's lives all around; but, with enactment in everyday practice, it has also eroded communities and widened the gap between elites and the rest in every country. In the past, power was often linked to the holdings of assets, notably land, by the few: in a word, elites inherited power. Today, most people draw their power from institutional affiliations: in nearly every country, they make up a far larger and more transient group whose

2 members lose their influence as they are dismissed from their jobs, resign, or retire. Hardoon (2015) described a world, fueled by the endless pursuit of profit, where more than a billion people survive on less than $1.25 a day and the combined wealth of the 80 richest persons, most of them male, equals that of the poorest 50 percent of humanity. (In 2015, 8 of the top 10 wealthiest billionaires were American.) Hardoon (2015) noted that the wealth of the 80 richest people in the world had doubled in nominal terms between 2009 and 2014. So the world might reward work, not wealth, and end the inequality crisis, Vรกzquez Pimentel et al.

(2018) entreated the business and political elites of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to build an economy for ordinary working people, not the rich and powerful.

Because labor costs in the developing world can be a tenth of what they are elsewhere, millions of people in the West have taken to the streets to protest against the effects of globalization on their jobs and communities. (The election of President Trump on a clearly protectionist platform in 2016 and the United Kingdom referendum of the same year on withdrawing from the European Union are but two recent, national-level examples of the backlash against globalization; increased populism elsewhere is another.) In high-income countries, the working class whose jobs were physically exported feature prominently among the newly disenfranchised but knock-on effects as globalization increased demand for professionals have marginalized the less educated and widened income gaps; migrants seeking livelihoods are another emergent progeny of globalization. In developing countries, bottom-line business incentives drive poor working conditions in manufacturing even as employment in services rises here and there. There is more: the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, spread by the ceaseless traveling that globalization has encouraged, has over the last six months killed more than 942,000 persons worldwide and affected every individual and community one way or the other (World Health Organization, 2020). COVID-19 could lead to the emergence of a "lockdown generation", with young people being disproportionately affected by multiple shocks such as disruption to education and training, loss of employment and income, and difficulties in securing a job (International Labour Organization, 2020). Among young workers, one also finds disparities by education and by race: Black and Hispanic workers and workers with lower levels of education are suffering larger increases in unemployment. Meanwhile, from a study of 3 million people, DeFilippis et al. (2020) confirmed that work-from-home employees are swamped with more meetings and emails. Next, boosted by COVID-19, information and communication technology will allow virtual migration of jobs thanks to telerobotics and telepresence. Then, those developing countries that benefited most from globalization in recent decades (e.g., the People's Republic of China, India) will see their manufacturing industries offshore where costs are lower: in turn, they will experience the effects that globalization had in the West. Based on earlier work, Sen (2009) topically positioned capability, the set of valuable functionings that a person has effective access to, as an alternative to economic approaches to the evaluation of well-being. And yet, globalization will continue: ubiquitous information and communication technology has been its main engine and the ideology of neoliberalism, which (self-servingly) emphasizes the value of free market competition, has played an active supporting role. So it might be more successful, the cultural, ecological, economic, and political dimensions of globalization must be addressed with policies that help the communities the process impacts.

Critical Psychology for Minority Populations 1.

The Continuing Relevance of Critical Theory in the 21st Century

Born of different historical and social events from the late 18th century to the late 20th century, anarchism, chaos theory, and postmodernism are critical (social) theories that, from different perspectives, reveal how institutional arrangements can inhibit social justice and well-being (Fox

3 et al., 2009; Serrat, 2020). Anarchism signals ways to reorganize society on a voluntary, cooperative basis to better suit human needs. In chaos theory, societies are complex adaptive systems that defy predictability. Postmodernism warns that progress is not assured: Glenn et al.

(2017) listed the challenges of the 21st century as sustainable development and climate change, water and sanitation, population and resources, democratization, global foresight and decision making, global convergence of information and communication technology, the rich– poor gap, health issues, education and learning, peace and conflict, the status of women, transnational organized crime, energy, science and technology, and global ethics.

Likewise, critical psychology helps explicate growing opposition to globalization: it sees that Occupy Wall Street (2011) and the Yellow Vests (2018–) are expressions of dissatisfaction with unfettered markets that—with governments serving as handmaidens—emphasize profits rather than human benefits. Even so, economic integration cannot be easily undone, as the Brexit negotiations that began in 2017 have demonstrated, and strictly national solutions cannot suffice. Why? Because globalization is "the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa" (Giddens, 1991, p. 64). And so, critical psychology reasons that countries must unite around social market models, make common use of institutions, and project what values of social justice and well-being associate with these.

2. Institutional Arrangements for Social Justice and Well-Being It is not that institutional arrangements for social justice and well-being must be built from scratch: thankfully, in this case, the world remains connected by an institutional infrastructure that was set up in the 1940s and 1950s "to maintain international peace and security", "develop friendly relations among nations", "achieve international cooperation in solving international problems", and "be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends" (United Nations, 1945, p. 3). The United Nations System has been resilient: its specialized agencies and affiliated organizations remain highly relevant; ready to synergize institutional arrangements at regional, national, and local levels; and willing to help offset iniquities where they are. Similarly, the emergence in 1999 of the Group of Twenty (G20) to discuss international financial stability suggests the idea of global governance may not be utopian (Steger, 2017). It is by way of existing and evolving institutional arrangements, not "America First" or suchlike attitudes, that global commerce can be made to serve social justice and well-being. The United Nations, for example, has promoted glocalization in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015). Glocalization welcomes universalizing and particularizing forces in economic, political, and social systems so people might with global awareness live more local lives (Robertson, 1995). The glocalization of governance, for one, would have global standards adapt to local specifics and local developments inform global regulations. Glocalization would humanize globalization. Toward this, the geopolitical binarism that has undercut the far-sighted vision of the United Nations must be tempered if legitimate institutional arrangements for social justice and well-being are to boost subsidiarity, relationships, accountability, and learning for better governance.

The Intersection of Critical Psychology and Globalization Globalization impacts individuals and communities and engenders social issues through what Scholte (2000) made out to be deterritorialization, internationalization, liberalization, universalization, and Westernization. The psychological dimensions globalization bears on include the nature of the self and identity, quality of life, mental health, responses to climate change, and intergroup relations (Diaz and Zirkel, 2012). Elaborating, Diaz and Zirkel (2012)

4 explained that "Bronfenbrenner's (1977) ecological model […] captures the multifaceted interplay between small systems (the individual), intermediate systems (i.e., family, school, work, neighborhood) and large systems (prevailing norms, historical events)" and " […] provides the appropriate theoretical heuristic to make connections between macroscale processes such as globalization and individual level processes such as identity development, individual beliefs, attitudes, behavior, and health" (p. 444).

If they integrate class, gender, race, and other identity categories into critical theory constitutively, critical psychologists can advocate for social justice and well-being better across more—and larger—minority populations. So they might join the discourse on globalization and frame their interventions as clinicians, consultants, and researchers, Prilleltensky (2012) invited critical psychologists to investigate the what, who, why, and how of the process: The first question consists of three elements: people, products, and processes. The second question contains two parts: by whom and for whom. The third answer consists of an agentic response and a socio-historical one. Finally, the last question contains several answers, ranging from the psychological to the political. (Prilleltensky, 2012, p.

612) To push globalization towards justice and well-being with implications for education, research, and policy, Prilleltensky (2012) advised critical psychologists to embrace an ecological and multidimensional view of justice; an ecological and multidimensional view of well-being; and a systematic approach to personal, organizational, and social change. Accepting that "the challenge of globalization for justice and well-being is too big to bear by any one discipline", Prilleltensky (2012) invited the larger body of psychology to stop "individualizing problems, arrogating power, neglecting context, blaming victims of injustice, and extolling the virtues of the status quo" (p. 626).

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