Us vs Them: The Sinister Techniques of ‘Othering’ – and How to Avoid Them

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This article titled “Us vs them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’ – and how to avoid them” was written by John A. Powell, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 8th November 2017 12.37 UTC

We are in the midst of a rapidly changing world. More than 300 million people are currently living outside their homelands. Ethno-nationalism is on the rise – from the Rohingya people forced out of Myanmar in what many are calling the world’s latest genocide, to neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in an action President Trump pointedly refused to condemn.

Humans can only process a limited amount of change in a short period of time without experiencing anxiety. It’s a natural human reaction – but how we respond to that anxiety is social.

When societies experience big and rapid change, a frequent response is for people to narrowly define who qualifies as a full member of society – a process I call “Othering”. An alternative response is seeing the change in demographics as positive, and regarding the apparent other as enhancing our life and who we are. This is what I refer to as “belonging and bridging”.

Othering is not about liking or disliking someone. It is based on the conscious or unconscious assumption that a certain identified group poses a threat to the favoured group. It is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact. Overwhelmingly, people don’t “know” those that they are Othering.

So while today’s global anxiety has been precipitated by globalisation, technology and a changing economy, demographics play a crucial role in the process of Othering. The attributes of who gets defined as Other differ from place to place, and can be based upon race, religion, nationality or language. It is not these attributes themselves that are the problem, of course, but how they are made salient, and how they are manipulated.

I am therefore particularly concerned with how Othering shows up in today’s power structures: how it is used to divide and dehumanise groups, and capture and reshape government and institutions. For society’s leaders and culture play an oversized role in helping us make sense of change – and so greatly affect our responses to anxiety.

In the United States, politicians used to engage in what scholar Ian Haney-Lopez calls “dog whistles” – they could make references to Others but only in a coded way; never saying “those Mexicans” or “those Muslims”, for example. President Trump, however, has opened a space where people are emboldened to be more explicit. We now have not only our nation’s leadership but many of our information networks amplifying these explicit calls to exclude and dehumanise.

The rhetoric and language coming from Trump has begun to both define and normalise Othering. This is a threat to all the things we value. When Mexicans can be called “rapists and drug dealers” in direct contradiction to the facts, it becomes a much easier step to call for their deportation, and for a literal wall to divide us.

Exclusion and Dehumanisation
The language being used by many national leaders not only activates people’s anxiety and fear around a perceived Other, it creates new processes of exclusion and dehumanisation.

While it is common to focus only on economic changes to explain the rise of right-wing nationalists and Othering, the loss of economic power is not the only thing stirring anxiety around the globe. Sweden is experiencing a rise of group-based nationalism, yet its economy is not suffering. Trump voters included a large number of affluent whites, not just the poor or working class.

It’s not that the economy is unimportant, it’s just that it doesn’t tell the whole story. After a number of important civil rights victories in the US in the 1960s, the conservative elites strategised how to trade on smouldering white Southern resentment of these gains. With the Southern Strategy of stoking white resentment, they succeeded in remaking the Republican Party – ultimately moving government away from protecting people and towards protecting capital.

Conservative elites know how to strategically create and use fear of a perceived Other, by organising and manufacturing fear. When Nixon began using the term “law and order”, his popularity was cemented among a certain base because he was appealing to a specific kind of conservative white fear: not primarily about jobs, but rather the changing social order. This was not precipitated by a specific economic downturn, yet the outcome of Nixon’s strategy was the securing of an economy rigged for the rich.

People don’t just figure out on their own that collectively they need to be afraid of another group. Leadership plays a critical role. Often people who have been living with one another for years are made to feel suddenly that those differences have become threatening.

Richard Nixon cemented his popularity by appealing to conservative fears about the changing social order. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis via Getty Images

The recent rhetoric around people who are undocumented in the US, many of whom have lived here for their whole lives, has created a culture of fear for millions, has demonised children, and has created suspicion and anger in communities where none had existed before.

A friend from the deep south tells the story of her father asking with all sincerity if he should turn in to the authorities a waiter at a restaurant he suspects doesn’t have “papers”. Five years ago, this concern wasn’t even part of his consciousness, and the same waiter had been serving him for far longer than that. Who activated that concern? A demagogue understands the power of language and the deep ontological forces that are essential to how people experience their lives. It’s not necessary that these demagogues believe what they say.

The stories we tell, and live, are not about facts but our values, fears and hopes – all of which, to a certain degree, are malleable. Our narratives don’t just reflect them, they also shape them. While anxiety about change is natural, Othering is not. Othering is socially and culturally constructed.

So how do we respond to our collective anxiety today? Either we “bridge”, reaching across to other groups and towards our inherent, shared humanity and connection, while recognising that we have differences; or we “break”, pulling away from other groups and making it easier to tell and believe false stories of “us vs them”, then supporting practices that dehumanise the “them”.

Part of the solution to Othering must come from the stories we tell. As the world undergoes profound shifts, how do we build true societies of belonging? We can look to Canada as one positive example. While it still has its difficult issues, Canada has said to its multi-racial, multi-ethnic population, “Keep your identity”. Canadians have held on to their religious and ethnic backgrounds while they also connect with others. And the far right-wing in Canada has not cracked 10%.

If we are to combat the rising tide of extremism across the globe, we must actively create bridges across difference, and resist strategic exploitation of our collective anxiety. For when we bridge, we not only open up to others, we also open up to change in ourselves – and actively participate in co-creating a society to which we can all belong.

The opposite of Othering is not “saming”, it is belonging. And belonging does not insist that we are all the same. It means we recognise and celebrate our differences, in a society where “we the people” includes all the people.

• john a powell is the director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley
• If you have experiences relating to this article that you’d like to share, please email us at inequality.project@theguardian.com

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