John A. Powell and Stephen Menendian’s article “The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging” raises many good points about the human tendency to categorize and how that impacts our experience in society. One of the points that stood out to me was that about demagoguery, which in itself makes me want to curse the existence of politicians in general. I suppose it was always something in my periphery, but that section in particular helped me put a word to the playing-on-fear techniques people in power like to use to cause frenzies. The examples of how Trump chose to “other” specific groups and so made such “othering” acceptable did nothing to improve my temper when reading. Another point that stood out to me in this article is how the authors went about explaining the purpose for the term “Othering.” I never really gave much thought as to how other terms that serve the same purpose but on a far more specific scale can highlight the lines in the sand between groups of people. I remember in particular their note on how Barack Obama didn’t like to use the term “Islamophobia” in his addresses despite the criticism he faced for it, for similar reasons. While I understand a lot of what the article is talking about, especially in terms of ingroups and outgroups and how we perceive ourselves and others because of them, I can fortunately say I have little experience feeling “othered” in group settings, at least in a truly harmful sense. I have, however, seen it happen to a lot of those around me. The first example to come to mind is how students were treated in school based on whether they were in the IB program vs American Diploma. You really wouldn’t think that the difference would create as big of a rift as it did, but it was quite obvious. Administrators’ favoritism of one group over another aside, the students in each of the groups themselves “othered” each other quite obviously. For example, the later into high school you went, the less the two groups mixed. IB students had a tendency to favor their own, since they were made up of a smaller group and had forged bonds through stress and the shared pain of the grinder they were all being put through. Extra efforts in their program were made to strengthen bonds between them, and the unique schedule they endured through the end of the year brought them all together in their differences. This estranged them from AD students, who made up a much larger group. They were further divided by the sentiments they held towards each other (particularly that one group was composed of academic elitists and the other of lazy slackers), and matters were not improved by the general feeling that AD students were not attended to as closely. That said, come senior year, the lines between the groups had plenty of opportunity to be blurred and ignored. In events such as prom or during discussions as to the design of the senior jacket, the ingroups of “IB student” and “AD student” were forgotten in favor of the larger and more inclusive group of “high school senior.” From this, I think we can learn that one of the best ways to counter outgroup “othering” is to broaden our groups as much as possible and remind ourselves of our similarities more than our differences.
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