Othering Quotes

“Nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening.”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

“Only by moving out of fear and hatred can we
truly manifest the vision of our founders--
not their actual vision, because they were limited, too,
but the theoretical vision to which they aspired.

The 'other side' is not the enemy.
Fear and hatred are the enemies.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Why, he wondered, did he have to peddle his difference for their amusement, and yet at the same time temper it, suppress it, make it suitably benign?”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“I don’t believe there has ever been a more terrible weapon in this world than the word they.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“The big challenge of our time is to make sure that when our hearts break [amidst climate catastrophe] we stay open and connected and curious rather than coming up with stories to justify ourselves being violent to others that we have othered more than those closest to us.”
― Jem Bendell

“A "racist" thinks themselves better than other races. An "elitist" thinks they are better than everyone.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Rather than look back on childhood, I always looked sideways on childhood. If to look back is tinted with a honeyed cinematography of nostalgia, to look sideways at childhood is tainted with a sicklier haze of envy, an envy that ate at me when I stayed for dinner with my white friend’s family or watched the parade of commercials and T.V. shows that made it clear what a child looked like and what kind of family they should grow up in. The scholar Kathyrn Bond Stockton writes, "The queer child grew up sideways, because queer life often defied the linear chronology of marriage and children". Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways since their youth is likewise outside the model of an enshrined white child. But for myself it is more accurate to say that i looked sideways at childhood… to look sideways has another connotation - giving side eyes telegraphs doubt, suspicion, and even contempt.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“He belongs to that fraction of humanity which for centuries has made other fractions the objects of contempt and exploitation, then, when it saw the handwriting on the wall, set about to give them back their humanity.”
― Minh-Ha Trinh T

“The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“I stood, in shame and confusion, seeing for the first time despite my anger a different picture of Evie in her life-long struggle to be clean and sweet. It was as if this object of frustration and desire had suddenly acquired the attributes of a person rather than a thing...”
― William Golding, The Pyramid

“We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools - of ranking the relative value of humans - are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“People may "other" me for the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes. This is their weakness. It is not mine.”
― The Thoughtful Beast

“me standing there- just standing there- looking around and thinking, God, I'm not supposed to be here, I'm supposed to be somewhere else, this is wrong, this is *wrong*.”
― Chloe Gong, The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror

“In all his imaginings, he had never envisioned her crying. He knew that her son had died, but he'd never expected that her pain might be anything he could recognize, almost as though he believed that Negroes had their own special kind of grieving ritual, another language, something other than tears they used to express their sadness.”
― Bebe Moore Campbell, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine

“...I am determined to de-fang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself" (The Origin of Others, 53).”
― Toni Morrison

“But I learned from these new books that Southerners think we are really rather sad. They have an idea of a people dwelling on a mountain, inbred, lonely, mysterious; that we ritually climb and descend, and make sacrifices, and burn eternal flames, and send bridal parties from village to village in the spring so men like Daila can impregnate women like me, all in order to placate something implacable. They see our culture as rich, in the same way perhaps that a seam of ancient ore is rich — because of compression and repression. They imagine that we drink a lot, even more than we do (and it is a thing I learned from the bar, that they drink as much as we, that every culture that’s discovered alcohol drinks too much) and that we are poorer than we are because only a few of us sell anything to them.
A melancholy drunken land, a land of storytellers, a land of sly jokes, an Asam-hating land, and nothing like the land I remembered. It was as if someone had constructed a scaffolding around us, and then removed us and written only about the scaffolding. The more I read, the more the materials of the scaffolding — splintered wood, narrow pipes of metal — slid into the hollows of my bones. I knew that the next time I went to the mountain, I would have a stranger’s mind in mine. Though I walked in streets I had known since girlhood, I would never again be able to step upon them without an erudite word in my head and a bracing of metal in my marrow.”
― Rachel Fellman, The Breath of the Sun

“There is no such thing as ‘primitive’ people, except as created by other people’s primitivism. Primitivism is any cultural framework that typifies a set of others as incarnating an archaic condition of humanity radically different from the condition of the stereotypers themselves.”
― Rupert Stasch

“There is no us, Abu Fahd. There is no them.
We're all the same.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Just outside the walls of the City, trouble was brewing. They came in boats from a land far across the sea. Many boats crammed with many hopefuls washed up on the shores in the shadow of the great cliffs. Like driftwood. These flotsam people were dazed, broken – perhaps at an extreme – optimistic. Surely there would be salvation within the thick city walls?
They appeared in a whisper – like the hissing of the surf. No citizen came to welcome them. No delegates. No photo-ops for ambitious politicians. Instead, only the City’s military – soldiers and officers with faces as hard and blank as the cliff the City teetered upon – were waiting.
They were herded in silence. Those without papers were left on the stony beach. There would be tents, bunks, and prefab houses in time.
The lucky ones were escorted up the great lifts and transported along the subway system – out of sight. A Downtown station would process them.
See this crowd of Driftwood people, Eva. See them huddle together in the dark, the glint of hope in their eyes. The color of their skin, how the women covered their hair, and how the men wore their beards – these were the superficial differences that would mark them so starkly here. The label of ‘other’ already hung around their necks without them even knowing.”
― Marcel M. du Plessis, The Silent Symphony

“The polarities of personality often present as victim and oppressor, the haves and the have nots, rights and wrongs, and other seemingly persistent divisions in our society. These polarities are not the source of this tension, but when we relate with the polarities through a reactionary state of operation, we can easily divide ourselves along those lines. Us and them. The familiar and the other.

When we don't own our own wholeness, when we identity too much with something other than our core worth, we collapse into one pole, as in being with or against others. This othering process is myopic, in that it doesn't take into account that our own wholeness is dependent on reclaiming the alternate pole, the person we think we are not, the "other" within us.

When we are able to relate with each pole from a place of responsiveness, where we stand in recognition of our own innate wholeness, the experience of polarity can be one of expansion, flow, contrast and generative transformation, rather than division.

Once we reckon with the paradox of how the perceived other is both distinct, and a direct reflection of us, then we see ourselves in that mirror. We see everyone and everything as reflecting an aspect of ourself that we get to reclaim.

Those we might have judged become guideposts for our own liberation. Our triggers become welcomed signs that we have rejected something inside us.

The idea that you are either with us or against us is a limiting lens that perpetuates humanity's suffering. The recognition that you are us, that everyone is us, allows our self-love to humanize others into belonging.”
― Gareth Gwyn, You Are Us: How to Build Bridges in a Polarized World

“Proximity to Whiteness can help immigrants and people of color literally survive in this country. Your othering will be minimized, and if you're lucky, you can be spared from discrimination, profiling, and ending up on the wrong registries.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“As Fawaz Gerges has astutely argued, Egyptian nationalism developed in response to British colonization of Egypt, hence a concept of ‘sameness’ in opposition to the ‘other’ became prevalent.
Chapter 1: Genesis, page 31”
― Maged Mandour

“And isn't that the kind of thing we fear strangers will do? Disturb. Betray. Prove they are not like us?”
― Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others

“Starting from the premise of the organic unity of the nation, the opposition can be painted as social groups outside the ‘nation’, since, simply put, they threaten the nation’s natural harmony. However, this concept is only plausible if the regime, or, more precisely, the military, is able to portray itself as a representative of the nation and guardian of the state, which it has been very successful in doing. Hence, opposition to the military regime is equated with treason to the nation, and thus should be repressed by any means necessary.
The narrative used to solicit popular support involved the propagation of numerous conspiracy theories, including the claim that the events of 2011, the groups that participated in it, and those who support it are part of a systemic effort to destroy the Egyptian state, which was only thwarted by the military’s intervention in 2013.”
Chapter “Genesis”, page 33”
― Maged Mandour, Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge

“When describing the opposition, remaining true to the regime narrative, Sisi coined a new term: ‘The people of evil’ (BBC, 2016). The term started to gain currency in 2016, when popular opposition to the transfer of the two islands in the Red Sea, Tiran and Sanafir, from Egyptian to Saudi sovereignty became apparent. However, it first made an appearance during Sisi’s speech inaugurating the nee Suez Canal in 2015 (Armbrust, 2019, p. 223). Even though it was never explicitly defined, it became clear that Sisi used it to describe the opposition in general, with specific mention of those who doubted and criticized the regimes ‘achievements’ (RT, 2019). Sisi used a rhetoric that not only framed the opposition as evil but also framed the regime as good, and the conflict between them as an existential struggle between good and evil: a biblical image par excellence. The framing of the opposition as evil and treasonous was not only a rhetorical device but also laid down the foundation of mass repression.” Chapter “Genesis”, Pages 37-38”
― Maged Mandour, Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge

“„n”
― Rebekka Endler, Witches, Bitches, It-Girls: Wie patriarchale Mythen uns bis heute prägen

“The risk of racist religiosity are great. By projecting grievances, fears and anxieties onto the 'shadow' figures of other races, religious transcendence is stunted and perverted into the dynamics of delusion and hatred. Instead of genuine spirituality, there is partiality, separation, restriction. A rigid self-righteousness leads down into the spiritual basement of a primitive dualism, where pseudo-salvation depends on elimination of the Other. The political projection of religious Manichaeism onto human differences inevitably leads to strife and violence. Whenever human groups are interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness, both the human community and humanity itself are diminished. Such degraded religion never leads to light but only to darkness.”
― Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity