Editorial: Stop the Cycle of Othering

You could think of the past couple years as one of time’s many tests for humanity — similar to that of the atomic bombings of eight decades ago.

Over the past 20-something months, we’ve watched as our government has supported and helped fund an ongoing effort to ethnically cleanse and mass murder Palestinians in Gaza.

Many turned the other way. Many avoided talking about it. Many feared losing friends or their jobs if they spoke up. Some people, horrifically, cheered the slaughter, and still do.

What has allowed this to happen? The same thing that allowed the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki decades earlier, and the same thing that allows so many other atrocities: “Othering.” Othering is what allows people to think of those outside their group as different from — and often not as important as — them.

The strange thing is, many people in this diverse United States have at one point in time themselves been the victims of othering. Some people still are. This shows that just because one person has been the target of discrimination or bias or outright hate does not mean that person has been inoculated from othering. The sad reality is people often are both the victim and the victimizer when it comes to othering.

The cost of this cycle of prejudice to society is constant trauma and worse.

At its extreme, othering dehumanizes entire groups of people. The list of tragically othered peoples is long: Blacks, the indigenous, the disabled, those who identify as gay and transgender, refugees, the poor. Jewish people during the Holocaust and in the many years prior were of course victims of unthinkable dehumanization. So were the Chinese during the invasions by the Japanese during the early half of the 1900s. (And then we have China’s more recent horrific treatment of the Uyghurs.) Closer to home, Native Americans could only have been slaughtered away because they were othered. And massive numbers of Japanese could only have been evaporated and burned in the U.S.’ atomic bombings because they were viewed as others.

Those bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were recently remembered on their 80th anniversary earlier this month.

Instead of letting that moment pass by as just another dark chapter in history, consider reflecting on what each of us can do to stop the cycle of othering — and to look for ways instead to build solidarity and connections with our fellow human beings.

— A.S.