What is Othering?

In 2018 I introduced the social phenomenon known as “Othering”. I’ve talked about it many times since. In NN Number 646 of September 15, 2019, I attempted to explain, in simple terms, what people are talking about when they talk about Othering. Here is that attempt:

“The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of ‘Othering.’ In a world beset by seemingly intractable and overwhelming challenges, virtually every global, national, and regional conflict is wrapped within or organized around one or more dimension of group-based difference.”

A couple of times in the past year I have quoted from a remarkable publication called “Othering and Belonging: Expanding the Circle of Human Concern.” The above quotation is taken from that publication, in fact from the first issue that came out in 2016.

What is “Othering”? Othering is defined as a complex set of “dynamics, processes, and structures” that work together to mark some people as belonging and others as not belonging to a group. Scholar and activist john a. powell says that “When societies experience big and rapid change, a frequent response is for people to narrowly define who qualifies as a full member of society.” And this process is what he calls “Othering.”

In Issue #1 of “Othering and Belonging,” john a. powell and Stephen Menendian state that “The most important good we distribute to each other in society is membership. The right to belong is prior to all other distributive decisions since it is members who make those decisions. Belongingness entails an unwavering commitment to not simply tolerating and respecting difference but to ensuring that all people are welcome and feel that they belong in the society.”

In the pages of Nygaard Notes I often refer to “us” and “them” and the processes by which the dominant group decides who is one of “us” and who is one of “them.” Sociologists talk about “ingroups” and “outgroups,” where ingroup members get stuff that outgroup members are denied.

Rapid social and economic change breeds insecurity, as people fear losing whatever they have. Such insecurity can lead to greater unity—as people band together in defense of their common interests—or it can lead to greater division, as demagogues attempt to unite the dominant groups against those who can be labeled “The Other.” The Other is identified as the cause of the problem, what we call the scapegoat. There’s a lot of scapegoating going on these days.

Intersectionality

When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, she was pointing out that neither feminist analyses nor anti-racist analyses by themselves were able to capture the complexity of the oppression that is a part of the lives of black women. Crenshaw rejected the use of what she called a “single categorical axis” (that is, either racism or sexism) to describe the experience of “multiply-burdened” people, saying that “Because the intersectional experience [of black women] is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”

As the United States gets more diverse, the process of Othering—which has been going on as long as the United States has been going on—becomes ever more complex.

There are all sorts of markers of human difference that can be—and are—used to group people together for the purpose of Othering, among them religion, sex, race, ethnicity, class, disability, sexual orientation, and skin tone. And the concept of intersectionality reminds us that identity is complex and the basis for Othering someone often involves multiple aspects of their identity. Opening the door to full Belonging thus requires us to understand and engage with Othering in its various forms.

Such understanding is essential if we want to be effective in countering the Othering process that is so prevalent today. And it’s even more essential if we want to be effective in building a new society based on true Belonging.

Trumpism, The Wall, and Terrified Whiteness

I talk about Othering a lot because I believe that it is one of the fundamental social forces behind much of the violence, conflict, and social oppression that are so much a part of modern societies large and small. The phenomenon that I call “Trumpism,” for example, is based on Othering, as I attempted to explain in this essay from Nygaard Notes Number 646 of September 15, 2019:

Back in April I published a piece called “Let’s Not Call Donald Trump a Racist.” My point was that the labeling of Donald Trump as a racist reinforces the idea that racism is the result of hateful people deciding to do hateful things. And this leads us away from a systems analysis and toward an individualistic analysis, which is not helpful.

In that April essay I said that we should stop trying to figure out whether or not Donald Trump is a racist, or what kind of racist he is. Instead, I said, we should be asking a whole other set of questions. Starting with this one: What sorts of conditions must exist in the culture for someone like Donald Trump to ascend to the Presidency?

In this issue I argue that we are now—and have been for some time—in a period of increasing challenge to a long-prevailing social order. How long? Well, white men have been at the top since they first set foot in this hemisphere, really since the age of European conquest began early in the 15th Century. I call it the Age of Conquest. Most of us have been taught to call it the Age of Exploration, or maybe the Age of Discovery. That’s because the dominant group in a society gets to name things, and the conquerors would rather we think of them as explorers or discoverers. Language is important; that’s why I write.

Big Changes Underway

Elsewhere in this issue I quote scholar and activist john a. powell, who tells us “When societies experience big and rapid change, a frequent response is for people to narrowly define who qualifies as a full member of society.”

The changes occurring in the early 21st Century are big and rapid indeed! Each one of them is terrifying to large segments of the population, and perhaps are most terrifying to those with the most to lose. What changes am I talking about? Well… The decline of the U.S. Empire is accelerating. Global climate disruption is unprecedented. Digital technology is revolutionizing how information is produced and distributed. Capitalism is in crisis, with its “boom-and-bust” cycles producing weaker booms and stronger busts, forcing the 99 percent into ever-more-precarious positions.

While it’s unlikely that most people fully understand the implications of all these changes, there is an increasing sense that “things are changing,” and not for the better. White men in particular are terrified that all this change could result in a re-ranking of the social order, causing them to lose their place as the dominant group. The election of a black president was and is to many people a powerful symbol of this. And I have mentioned in these pages the terror that is felt by many white people as they become aware that the day is fast approaching when white people will no longer be the absolute majority in the United States. Anthropologist H. Samy Alim has called this terror “Demographobia.”

At such a time of tumult, when so many are terrified and feeling abandoned, large numbers of people in, or wishing to be in, the dominant group look for leaders who offer a sense of group identity, who promise to clarify exactly who is Us and who is Them. And every time a leader insults, demonizes, excludes, targets, blames, accuses or otherwise scapegoats an identifiable Other it is another brick in the wall separating winners from losers, separating the in-group from the innumerable out-groups, separating the virtuous from the wicked, separating Us from Them.

The Washington Post reported on August 27th that “President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project. He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.”

Later in the article the Post reported “Trump conceded last year in an immigration meeting with lawmakers that a wall or barrier is not the most effective mechanism to curb illegal immigration, recognizing it would accomplish less than a major expansion of U.S. enforcement powers and deportation authority. But he told lawmakers that his supporters want a wall and that he has to deliver it.”

The reason that the promised wall at the southern border is so important is because it is a tangible, visible symbol of the overriding project of Trump and the social forces—which I call Terrified Whiteness—that have rallied around him. And that project is the narrowing of the definition of who qualifies as a full member of society.

Every time Trump makes comments or publicly takes actions that dehumanize people based on religion, sex, race, ethnicity, class, disability, sexual orientation (or whatever) it reassures all who are “not one of them” that they belong here, that this society is theirs.

And so, brick by brick is built the real wall promised by Trumpism: It’s a conceptual wall. On one side of it are those who belong. On the other side are those who do not belong. Such a wall requires a lot of maintenance, and constant reminders of which groups belong on which side.

The construction and maintenance of this wall is carried out by a process known as Othering, which is the subject of this issue of Nygaard Notes.

Trump and The Currents of Change

In NN Number 656 July 24, 2020 I revisited The Big Crisis, which is my term for the supercharged sociopolitical environment in which we find ourselves in the early part of the 21st Century. In this issue (which I called “The Big Crisis, Part 1),” I speak of a “visionary, system-changing hope,” the resistance to which is seen in the phenomenon of Trump. Not the man. The symbol. Here’s what I said three years ago:

On July 4th 2020 the Washington Post published an article headlined “Trump’s Push to Amplify Racism Unnerves Republicans Who Have Long Enabled Him.” It included this line: “On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret — mostly privately, to avoid his wrath — that Trump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change.”

It’s not just race and “other cultural issues.” In fact, a general rejection of the currents of change is the essence of what unites the social forces unleashed by the rise of Trump. My name for these social forces is “Trumpism,” the use of which I hope reminds people that these social forces, while focused and strengthened by the election of Donald Trump, were not created by him. What animates the Trumpist “base” goes beyond the Trump nostalgia for 1950s-style racism. And, while demographics assures that such nostalgic efforts will become increasingly futile, the futility doesn’t start or end with demographics.

The Big Crisis

In the year 2020, several major systems are in crisis, with each crisis of a magnitude sufficient to reshape life in the United States. They’re all connected and, taken together, they amount to what may be called The Big Crisis. The racism crisis and the coronavirus crisis are at the top of the list at the moment, but there are other, equally earth-shaking crises that we would do well to consider.

The Crisis of Climate Disruption surely tops the list, as the earth’s capacity to support human life itself is threatened.

The Crisis of Inequality and Resource Allocation—Who Gets What, and How Much—is destabilizing democratic structures and economic systems around the world as the have-nots demand to be heard.

The Crisis of a Declining U.S. Empire threatens the ability of the U.S. to dominate global trade and finance, upon which American wealth depends.

The Crisis of U.S. Democracy exposes the systems of privilege and domination that have, up to now, reserved political power for white men of property.

The Crisis of Capitalism offers hope for—or fear of, depending on where one sits—the birth of a new global order based on sustainable cooperation rather than greed and competition.

The Crisis of Social Health is exposing millions of people to the idea that the American Dream—to the extent that it was ever achievable—was based on the twin myths of equal opportunity and endless growth, a vision that is receding into the distance as living standards decline for the 99 percent.

Systems and Possibilities

Systems theory says that “A system is the unavoidable outcome of organized intentions.” What this means is that the people who set up systems set them up because they want them to do certain things. If those systems fail to do what they want—that is, if the systems don’t reflect their “organized intentions”—then they will set up different systems if they are able.

For centuries the only people who were able to do this were white men of property. The Big Crisis may be changing this! Increasingly-visible instability in so many major systems—Climate Disruption, Inequality, a waning Empire, a weak Democracy, fading Capitalism, declining Social Health—is causing long-dormant seeds of hope to sprout as people begin to believe that these seemingly-eternal systems may not be eternal after all. Maybe another world IS possible.

These are the Currents of Change facing the Trumpists and their reactionary allies. In this light, things like the “surge” of federal troops into our cities, the building of The Wall, and the heavy-handed attempts to suppress voting can be seen as merely the rearguard actions of the flag-bearers of a failing social order.

Calls for justice for George Floyd and for the defeat of Donald Trump have brought people into the streets. What will keep them there is hope. This visionary, system-changing hope is captured in the words of activist and author Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

[From here I went on, in Parts 2 and 3 of The Big Crisis series, to discuss each of the earth-shaking crises mentioned above.]

George Floyd and the Dominant Thought System

The following essay was written in the months after George Floyd was murdered on the streets of my city, Minneapolis Minnesota. In it, I offer an exercise that shows how a Thought System works to shape our understanding of even the most dramatic and well-documented events. If you think you understand what happened to George Floyd because “I saw the video!” then this essay is for you.

I refer here to a “Systalectics Orientation,” for purposes of contrasting it with the Dominant Thought System. Now, as I said in the last issue, I have abandoned the term “Systalectics.” But only the word; the concept of utilizing systems theory and dialectics to help us liberate ourselves from the Dominant Thought System is still very valid, methinks. So, when you read “Systalectics Orientation, or SO,” you’ll know that I am referring to a “Dialectical Systems Orientation, or DSO.”

This essay originally appeared in Nygaard Notes Number 659 September 18, 2020.

Back in the year 2014 I introduced to Nygaard Notes readers the idea of “Thought Systems.” To make a long story short, a Thought System is a socially-created set of rules that operates unconsciously in our minds to shape the way we think. It’s nothing to be alarmed about, anyone who lives in a society – that is, all of us – has been socialized to think in certain ways. (For more on this, go back and read Nygaard Notes #560, “The Creation of a Thought System.”)

The United States has a Thought System that is based on the ideology of Individualism. Despite the dominance of this Thought System, I suggested that one could train oneself to think in a different way, following the rules of a different Thought System. I offered a tool to help in this “retraining,” a tool that I called Systalectics. Systalectics is my word for a Thought System – perhaps a better word is “Orientation” – that draws on Systems Thinking and Dialectics.

It’s pretty hard to define Systalectics, so I didn’t try. Rather than attempting to define Systalectics, I offered a short “compare and contrast” exercise that attempted to illustrate how one could draw different conclusions based on the same story, or even the same fact, depending on the thought system that one used in thinking about that story or fact.

Now it’s 2020, and so much has changed since 2014 that I think it is time to update the exercise.

What follows is a list of seven “rules” imposed on our thinking by the Dominant Thought System, or DTS. For each of these seven DTS rules, I offer an alternative rule that is derived from a Systalectics Orientation (SO). Then, since so many people in the past few months have been thinking about George Floyd and his murder at the hands of police, for each rule I make a suggestion of how we can, right now, try to think about this very emotional subject using SO rules rather than the reflexive DTS rules.

If this exercise works the way I hope it will, I think it will offer a hint of the profound effect that the Black Lives Matter movement is having on the Dominant Thought System in the United States.

OK, that’s enough of an introduction. Let’s go ahead and compare and contrast two distinct Thought Systems: The Dominant Thought System, or DTS, and a Systalectic Orientation, or SO.

Thinking Outside the Box. An Exercise.

#1: The DTS tells us that we understand things by getting up close and examining the details.
SO says that understanding is only possible by viewing the whole.

Right now… Avert your gaze from the legal and political happenings in Minneapolis in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd and start thinking about what is going on at the state, national, and international levels that makes this such a big deal.

#2: The DTS leads us to take things apart to see how the pieces work.
SO says that things are defined by their behavior in relation to other things, so we shouldn’t take them apart. We have to look at as many pieces as we can. AND we have to look at them for a while to see how they work.

Right now… Looking more closely at the behavior of four specific Minneapolis police officers on May 25 2020 will not give us insight into what is happening. We need to look at the behavior of the whole department over time. AND we need to tune in to the voices of people of color as those voices, collectively, educate the white majority on the realities of living in a white supremacist culture.

#3: The DTS relies on something that academics call “Methodological Individualism,” which is the idea that “social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.” (That’s from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) The belief here is that things happen because individuals make them happen, and they make them happen because they want them to happen.
SO puts the focus on outcomes rather than motivations or intentions. Rather than ask “Who?” and “Why?,” SO looks for PATTERNS that produce OUTCOMES.

Right now… We cannot know what is in the hearts of the individuals whose decisions killed George Floyd. What we know—and what we need to know—is that there is a pattern of police interactions with people of color that produces murderous outcomes.

#4: The DTS holds that things happen because someone or something made them happen. So we are encouraged to assign blame, or evidence of intentional malice, or something that will tell us what caused a certain thing to happen.
SO says that systems produce outcomes for a variety of complex reasons. There is no “cause” of the things we see; instead we talk about “triggers” or “catalysts,” which can look like they are “causing” things to change, but really are just those things that add to existing, ready-to-change mixes of things and tip them over into transformation.

Right now, two things… First of all, here is where we talk about the “culture” of policing, as well as the larger culture in which it exists. As important as it is to prosecute and convict George Floyd’s killers, more important in the quest for “Justice for George” is to transform the culture that produces such killers into a culture that values black lives.

The second thing: Whatever short- or long-term changes in systems that occur in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, his death will not have caused those changes. Rather, that murder will hopefully be the catalyst that will produce new structures that will be built on the foundations laid over many years by activists and organizers whose work never stops. (For white people wondering in this moment “What can I do?”, my suggestion is to start studying up on how structural change happens, which should lead us, over time, to understand the various ways that our behavior in the world is supporting racism or supporting liberation. This process should reveal what we can do.)

#5: The DTS believes in one-way Causation. That is: A makes B happen. One corollary of this is that, if we take away “A,” then “B” won’t happen. Another corollary is that “It’s as simple as that.”
SO says that it’s never a one-way thing, and it’s never “As simple as that.” Rather, we shape our environment, and our environment shapes us, which is sometimes referred to as the “mutuality of interaction.”

Right now… This principle must lead us to reject the “Bad Apple Theory,” which says that a few “bad cops” are the problem, and simply weeding them out will stop police brutality. We should be far beyond that by now. More than 1,300 people in the U.S. died in police custody in the first six months of 2020.

#6: The DTS states what seems to be obvious: Things are what they are; what you see is what you get. The corollary is that there is no sense trying to change things, since things are what they are.
SO says that things are always changing, even if we can’t always see the changes happening. And we all play a part in HOW things change, whether we want to or not.

Right now… Before the recent (and ongoing) uprising against police brutality, the idea of heavily-armed police in every city and town was rarely questioned outside of activist circles; now we see that what appeared to be near-universal support for this type of policing is far less broad and deep than it appeared.

#7: The DTS is based largely on description: Where is it? How big is it? What color is it? Et cetera.
SO is based on function: What does it do? What is it supposed to do? How does it interact with and affect its surroundings? How do its surroundings affect it?

Right now… Calls for police “reform” focus on changing the size, the training, the racial composition, or the dwelling-places of police forces. Systalectics tells us that a system is the unavoidable outcome of organized intentions. The system of policing to which we are accustomed was created based on the “organized intentions” of certain people who lived a long time ago. Today, system change requires us to imagine the creation of a public safety system that reflects the organized intentions of the actual people who live here today, people who have until now been marginalized.

If this exercise was difficult for you, that illustrates how powerful is the Dominant Thought System.

If this exercise was easy for you, thanks go to the activists and intellectual leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement and their allies, who have – somewhat miraculously, in my mind – succeeded in getting mainstream commentators and media to talk about “structural racism” and “systemic change,” using an alternative Thought System based on the principles of Systems Thinking and Dialectics.

Cracks and fissures in some of our major institutions? Thinking and talking about these changes using an entirely different Thought System? This is the road to transformative change.

Freedom, Power, and Democracy

Here we are at the final essay in this 25-year retrospective of my favorite essays from Nygaard Notes.

It was difficult to choose which essay to feature as the final one in this retrospective. The one you see below, from NN Number 690 of August 15, 2022, which I called Freedom, Power, and Democracy, was chosen because those three subjects (freedom, power, and democracy, that is) are endlessly fascinating to me. The words are common, so common that it seems many people fail to take the time to think about them, what they really mean and how they interact.

Thinking about things that most people don’t think about—or, maybe, thinking about them in unusual ways—is what Nygaard Notes is all about, I think.

Careful readers might notice that I refer here to grocery stores again, when I mentioned the same metaphor in Volume 5 of this series, just two weeks ago! Well, I do love it, but bear in mind that last week’s grocery store reference appeared originally in 2014, while the reference in this volume comes from a 2022 essay. Twice in eight years isn’t too much, is it?

Thanks for sticking with me. The next Nygaard Notes will focus on… Well, I guess it will focus on Freedom, Power, and Democracy! But for now, here’s what I said on the subject last year.

If we want democracy, we have to give up some of our freedom.

Now, that’s a losing political message if I ever saw one!

But it’s true. And I believe the truth of it is obvious if we just think about it for a few minutes. So let’s think about it for a few minutes.

People often confuse freedom and power. Simply put, freedom is being able to do what you want to do, while power is being able to get other people to do what you want them to do.

I like to use the grocery store analogy: Anyone with money can buy anything that is on the shelves of the grocery store. That’s freedom. But only the owners of the stores and the farms and the distribution systems can decide what is on the shelves of the grocery store. That’s power.

So, if some people in a society have more power than others, that means that other people are going to have to be less free. That’s why the author and activist Frances Moore Lappé says that “real democracy” requires “the continuous and wide dispersion of economic and political power.”

Here’s another way of thinking about this, taken from a 2016 book called The ABCs of Socialism:

“At the core of these values [of freedom and democracy] is self-determination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. This is the context of freedom. But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity. This is the context of democracy. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take. https://s3.jacobinmag.com/issues/jacobin-abcs.pdf

As is the case with almost any discussion of social systems, the ideas of freedom and self-determination are easier to understand if we introduce the idea of socio-economic class into the discussion. Everyone wants more “freedom,” but the kind of freedom we want will tend to vary by class. People with more wealth and/or power will tend to give primary importance to the freedom TO. This is because the ability to do a lot of things is something that comes with wealth. Wealthy people (like the rest of us) naturally don’t want anyone putting limits on their freedom to do whatever they like. It’s also true that the wealth held by people in the upper classes offers them a certain degree of freedom FROM want, from exploitation, and so forth.

For members of the lower classes, on the other hand, the freedom FROM is often more important. This includes freedom from the harms that might occur if the freedoms of those above us in the social order are not limited. This form of Freedom is thus of relatively less importance the higher one goes on the social ladder.

When Lappé talks about the “continuous and wide dispersion of economic and political power” that is required for democracy, one of the things that this means is that decisions need to be made less often by individuals, and more often by collective processes that bring as many voices as possible into the discussion. This, too, affects different classes of people differently. And that’s because, when a group makes a decision, each participating voice is one voice among many. For powerful people—people who are used to their voice being THE voice—that marks a reduction in their power. For people who have been marginalized—people who are used to having no voice at all in decisions that shape their lives—being part of a democratic decision-making process means they have MORE power than they had before. Infinitely more power.

It is in this sense that Democracy—a system that emphasizes collective decision-making processes—increases the power of the weak, and decreases the power of the dominant. Or at least promises to. This dynamic explains in part the current efforts to limit democratic participation in U.S. politics. As traditionally-marginalized groups find their voices and insist on being allowed into the halls of power, traditional power centers fight back. Think voter suppression, anti-tax protests, calls for smaller government, etc.

I started this essay by saying that we have to give up some of our freedom if we want democracy. I hope that outlandish statement sounds a little less outlandish when we consider that, in many cases, a small sacrifice of MY personal freedom TO would be more than offset by an increase in OUR freedom FROM.

But this increase in freedom is obscured in a culture that fetishizes only the individualized form of freedom that I call Freedom TO. And one of the results is that many people who are struggling, who are alienated, who are feeling less free with every passing year, come to identify with the people at the top—the people who understandably emphasize the freedom TO and never the freedom FROM.

This is what a propaganda system does: It makes the fears and priorities of certain sectors seem universal, even logical, to millions of people, while making alternative thoughts seem outlandish or threatening, if not unthinkable.

And so the leaders who emphasize a limited vision of freedom attract millions whose understanding of freedom might otherwise focus on the ever-more-powerful structures and systems that pose the real threats to freedom. Freedom FROM… what? Capitalism? Could be.

Near the turn of the century Yale University political scientist Robert A. Dahl published a book called “On Democracy.” I leave you with some poignant words from that book, the wisdom of which we ignore at our peril:

“The relation between a country’s democratic political system and its nondemocratic economic system has presented a formidable and persistent challenge to democratic goals and practices throughout the twentieth century. That challenge will surely continue in the twenty-first century.”