What makes a minority?

One of the questions to prepare to discuss for my first seminar of PQM is ‘What makes a minority?’

And completely accidentally, while I was re-familiarising myself with my dissertation, by reading my Lit Review, I came across a wonderful sentence written by G. Pandey:

violence ‘is implicit in the insistent construction of permanent majorities and minorities, based usually on supposedly immutable racial, religious or ethnic differences, and in the construction of particular, special kinds of minority.’

Reading that sentence was like a ‘lightbulb’ moment. I produced the following sentence myself:

A minority is a construction in opposition to, and created by, a perceived majority, which has real physical, emotional, mental, societal, systematic, systemic repercussions upon the person and/or people who have been told that they form that minority.

It’s obviously not a perfect sentence, there are things that could probably do with more explaining, and the way it takes away all agency from the perceived minority is problematic to say the least. It might work better if I edit it with a suffix ‘or who claim that minority status themselves in opposition to a constructed majority.’ But it is a working understanding, and I think taking this, or something similar into my first seminar will at least provide a talking point.