Othering Today

 These actions of othering, essentializing, and deindividualizing are most often encountered today outside the extremes of war or genocide in their more banal, though no less destructive forms. Between groups of people they often take the forms of racism or sexism. The rampant prejudice and oppression in our culture are holdovers from the same othering that allowed more extreme behaviors in the past. 

 

These forms of mental boundary making (DeMello 259) are why women are still not paid equal to men or why the term ‘bitch’ is freely used to describe a woman seen as not being in her ‘proper’ cultural place somehow. They are the reason for the systemic racism we still have in this country/culture. They are the roots of why immigrant labor, or the ‘essential workers’ of our pandemic are often treated as lesser people and are discouraged from seeing their true power so as not to disturb the hierarchical status quo. Or put more succinctly, they are “occupying an inferior position while performing essential functions” (Moore, Kindle location 1265). These boundaries are the reason that “the election of black political leaders may prompt white enmity” and “both symbolic racial resentment and traditional racial attitudes [were] associated with othering Obama” (Tope). 

 

As applied to animals, these arbitrary boundaries allow us to mentally compartmentalize the delicious pork chop we had for dinner from our beloved family dog. Doing so in a way that we can enjoy them both, without guilt, as if they are not both living beings equivalent to one another, or ourselves. DeMello describes that “the animal is the absent referent in meat” (143). We have transformed it by the processes of someone else slaughtering, butchering, packaging, and marketing the former animal with euphemistic terms. Cows become beef, pigs become pork, and somehow by force of a word change, 9 Billion land animals go from living beings to our tasty food (DeMello 142).