The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison (June 2018)
Toni Morrison’s short but powerful work is a reflection on the implications of seeing the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘others’. She links this idea to a number of challenging topics including racism, equality, and globalization. A key insight from this work was how inventing ‘others’ allows the corrupt to create illusions of power. I thought about this for a little while and came up with the following breakdown of how such an invention might come to be.
The first step is to create the concept of ‘others’. The exact methodology for doing this is up to the perpetrator. Such a creation undermines the basic premise of equality many accept as fundamental to our democracy, of course, but people don’t seem to mind too much about this inconsistency once they get used to describing people in terms that emphasize our differences.
Next, demonstrate that the differences between ‘us’ and ‘others’ is relevant beyond surface details. This essentially means stripping away individuality since most individuals want the same things – a good family and social life, meaningful work, and an email subscription to TOA – and such acknowledgements of our shared humanity threaten the survival of the concept of 'others'. A good method here would be to emphasize how 'others' and their behaviors, preferences, or culture will undermine the existing traditions and institutions we – ‘us’ – have come to glorify over the years.
Finally, make the distinction of ‘us’ and ‘others’ seem like a regular feature of the world. This can happen in a number of ways. The simplest way is to have thoughtful discussions about how these distinctions have always existed and are therefore natural features of human life. Though often well intended, these historical discussions define the world in fixed terms that discourage people from trying to bring change.
Is race truly a regular and natural feature of the world? Is it an inarguable feature of human life? Or is race something we continue to discuss because racists came before us and used the very concept to foster their own illusion of power, a power that's left generations of victims in its wake? I'd like to think simply stopping our conversations about race would help but given how addicted society seems to be to its invention of race I suppose less drastic measures are first required to wean ourselves off of our dependence.
A small, simple, but perhaps powerful starting point might be to use language with greater precision whenever we are tempted by the ease and familiarity of racial descriptors. Morrison points out how Africans don’t always refer to themselves as black, preferring descriptors such as ‘Ghanaian’ or ‘Nigerian’ instead. This point spoke to me. I’ve never had a ton of time for food being described as ‘Asian’, for example. What is an ‘Asian’ salad dressing supposed to be? A mix of Indian and Indonesian influences? Or perhaps a blend of Korean and Pakistani pallets?
I suppose worrying about how to describe salad dressing does seem like a silly place to start in the context of race. And of course, replacing racial terms with nationalities is only a minor improvement in the context of dismantling the concept of 'others'. But as any salad eater knows, getting the dressing right is a tiny detail that can make a huge difference. The problem of 'us' and 'others' is a huge question for our age and not likely to be answered with one or two big ideas. Rather, it will take a lot of people paying very close attention to the details of how they speak and think to slowly and surely rebuild the connections that the false dichotomy of 'us' and 'others' has eroded away.
One up: I liked the comment that the most likely way someone becomes a racist is by following another’s example. Although I’m never a big fan of casual, generalized speculation about the inner workings of a young person’s psychology, it does seem like most people are not born racists and most people are not taught racism. What explanation remains for how a person grows up into a racist?
One down: I’m sure my somewhat utopian thought process above looks good on paper and all but the reality is that we are probably generations away from getting anyplace close to what I describe above. Just have a look at the conversation in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election – as Morrison notes, many commentators minimized the role of racism by explaining the result as a ‘populist uprising against Wall Street’. This argument did not explain why many brown or black workers did not vote for Trump despite sharing many of the same motivations as his supporters. In the alleged age of ‘big data’, failing to crunch the numbers and figure out the prominent role of race in voting decisions seems like a glaring oversight to me.
Even I was fooled at the time – I took that idea and ran with it for a while myself. It might not have quite made it into print here at TOA (though it probably did) but that was definitely a thought process I entertained for a short time after the election. And I’m (allegedly) always thinking these things through! I think it goes to show that there is a tendency (and maybe a preference) to explain away racism that is akin to conflating healing with numbing – just because the problem is no longer obvious doesn’t excuse people from following through to get the facts right and tell the story based on these facts.
Just saying: In one section, Morrison writes that globalization is a challenge to find the foreigner within and to seek the commonness in all humanity. I thought this was an interesting approach – in essence, she sees globalization as a challenge of cooperation.
This is a very different perspective from how globalization tends to be framed as a competitive challenge. But I think the distinction is significant. The language we use today to discuss globalization always characterizes it as a generally positive trend with some serious built-in threats to job security and cultural preservation. The inevitable result is yet another excuse to see different people as ‘others’ who are coming to take from us as opposed to working with us.
