“humanizing the other,”

Segregation is not simply physical separation; it is an attempt to deny and prevent association with another group. Denying association with another group is another way of denying that group’s basic humanity. In that sense, segregation is not just spatial projects but ontological.

This explains a growing movement to integrate students with physical disabilities into regular classrooms—it is an attempt to reduce their marginality by socializing with ability-normed students.

For example, gender-segregated schools are sometimes demanded, even in the United States, as a way to improve learning outcomes for boys and girls, who, its defenders argue, have difficulty learning in cross-sex environments, which manifest more behavioral problems.

At a minimum, there is evidence that markets do not do an effective job of promoting tolerance.

As harmful as discrimination, conscious or unconscious, may be on shaping group outcomes, it is the institutionalization and structural features of othering that perhaps most explain group-based inequalities.

In another study, images of persons identified by varying social groupings triggered different responses in the brain when observed under an MRI.45Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups,” Psychological Science 17, no. 10 (2006): 847–53. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2620_45").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2620_45", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Persons belonging to these especially marginalized outgroups did not even trigger recognition at a neural level as being human, as if they were animals or objects.

Through talk, tales, stories, gossip, anecdotes, pronouncements, news accounts, orations, sermons, preachments, and the like, definitions are presented and feelings expressed…If the interaction becomes increasingly circular and reinforcing, devoid of serious inner opposition, such currents grow, fuse, and become strengthened. It is through such a process that a collective image of a subordinate group is formed, and a sense of group position is set

Studies since the 1950s demonstrate the tendency of people to identify with whom they are grouped, no matter how arbitrary or even silly the group boundaries may be, and to judge members of their own group as superior. Studies dividing students into completely fabricated groups lead to consistently different perceptions of in-group and out-group members.

demagoguery is not an inevitable feature of political life in periods of geopolitical change or economic turmoil. It is a strategy dependent upon the choices of political actors.

Aristotle and other ancient Greeks warned of “demagogues”—leaders who used rhetoric to incite fear for political gain.

The idea of stoking anxiety, resentment, or fear of the “other” is not a new electoral strategy in American politics. Appeals to nativism, racism, and xenophobia are evident in almost every period of American history.

this article investigates the forces that contribute to othering

The fact that so many leaders and writers fumble

“Othering” is a term that not only encompasses the many expressions of prejudice on the basis of group identities, but we argue that it provides a clarifying frame that reveals a set of common processes and conditions that propagate group-based inequality and marginality.

Recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels also prompted soul-searching among publics in Western Europe, regarding the lack of cultural and geographic integration of ethnic and racial immigrant groups (many of whom hail from former European colonies) and the persistence of discrimination.

In June 2015, a white supremacist walked into a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, during a prayer meeting and shot and killed nine African Americans congregants, including the pastor.7Tessa Berenson, “Everything We Know about the Charleston Shooting,” Time, June 18, 2015, accessed August 1, 2015, http://time.com/3926112/charleston-shooting-latest jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2620_7").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2620_7", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });

even climate change.

They are bearing their witness.

When you hear me exclaim, over and over, “Alhamdulillah!”—“Praise God!”—when I hear that my son or husband has been killed by a sniper or carbomb or left gutted on the side of the road by the shabbiha (though we now use the word martyred for all the war dead, including two-week old daughters who die because of a siege on medical supplies), do you think me so twisted into barbarism by my baffling religion that I might truly find joy in this news, or must I add a note to explain that submitting to God’s will is the only way I have not to go utterly mad with grief fighting it?

I want to make the writing as dissonant as I can, to recreate a sense of disruption, of an essential brokenness. I want to make the writing as unobtrusive as I can, to have it slip easily into the mind, mild-mannered and unassuming, before revealing that it has been wearing a vest of explosives all along.

blue plate

“But Miss,” he replied, incredulous. “I’m not writing about war and bombs and tragedy. Why would I give them such names?”

Afterward, trying to pick them up and separate them out, I am left with a thousand cuts I can feel every time I move or breathe. Afterward I realize that there is a shard I have failed to remove, that it has entered my eyes and become lodged there, cutting into my vision always, digging into the form and content of my memories.

To translate a text is to enter into the most intimate relationship with it possible. It is the translator’s body, almost more so than the translator’s mind, that is the vessel of transfer. The mind equates words, expressions, deals with techniques and logistics; it is within the body that the real alchemy—mysterious, unnamed and inexplicable—takes place. That alchemy has to do with truth more than signification, that is, the animating force behind signification, which transforms it into meaning, into something that moves. Gayarti Spivak qualifies the act of translation as “erotic,” but there is something too gentle about that word to ring true for me. The word captures the act of surrender, and the abundantly physical communion with the text, but there is something messier and bloodier that is elided. More agonized and agonizing too. There is a violence in undoing someone’s words and reconstituting them in a vocabulary foreign to them, a vocabulary of your own choosing. There is a violence, too, in the way you are—for long moments—annihilated by the other; undone in return. Neither the translator nor the text emerges from the act unscathed.

From “to witness,” we get shahed, the one who witnesses; mashhad, the spectacle or the scene, but also shaheed, martyr; istishhad, to be martyred, to die for a cause.

My body vibrating, whether to the shattering of an earth drill or to the tension of what I read, I have witnessed them march in the streets calling for change, bury loved ones, resuscitate strangers, defy soldiers and snipers, wait in breadlines, pack their whole lives into vans and cars, undergo daily humiliation at checkpoints on their way to and from work, to and from university, which they have refused to leave or discontinue.

I have buried seven husbands, three fiancés, fifteen sons and a two-week old daughter I finally agreed to have at 42 for my husband’s sake