Minority Group/Majority

The terms majority and minority have both statistical and sociological meanings, and debate over usage has generally been driven by the conflation of the two. Statistically, a minority group is smaller than an extant majority group. Sociologically, it is a group singled out because of non-quantitative traits and is subject, whether by law or circumstance, to unequal treatment and access to power. Majority and minority have particular resonance in the United States because of the relevance of the terms to democratic governance; throughout the 19th century, anti-immigration activists invoked both racist and democratic thinking when warning that a “dilution” of the American population through the introduction of large numbers of immigrants would change the American character.

The worry is not merely concerned with the presence of people unlike oneself, but with the prospect of people like oneself—one's ethnic or cultural group—being literally or figuratively outvoted and losing control of the direction of the country. These fears continue to be invoked today in discussions of immigration, gay marriage, religious freedom, and the spread or perceived spread of Islam.

The term minority group retains elements of a meaning that has become less and less accurate if considered literally. The United States was originally founded by a group of white settlers, almost entirely British, French, and Dutch, with small numbers of Hispanics in or adjacent to lands obtained from Spain, and a number of blacks, mostly enslaved. This group was not only overwhelmingly Christian but also predominantly Protestant, though important Catholic and Jewish populations existed.

While the Protestant population's majority decreased over the course of the 19th century, as sustained large-scale immigration from Catholic countries began, the century's major religious movements were or grew out of Protestantism, or in the case of Reform Judaism, was an explicit reaction to and even surrender to American Protestant culture. This had the effect of further underscoring the unofficial place of preeminence of Protestantism in the American character, and by implication, of northern European whites.