Othering. What is it?
This is the act of defining what is normal and what is outside of daily routines and local experiences. When we frame ideas, culture, and people as foreign to our daily lives, we ‘other’ them. This then sets us up for defining what is familiar as comfortable and desirable, and anything that falls outside that comfort zone as undesirable.
This can be innocuous, even important to do, such as keeping your kids safe, but can be downright hostile in terms of new neighbours to a community. Once othering has been made commonplace in a locality, it then becomes part of daily life to look down on those ideas and people in the other group, and second-class citizens become normal.
Othering is easy as it appeals to our sense of the familiar, the safe, that which we know won’t hurt us—and how could that be wrong? Yet by defining the difference between normal and not normal the feeling of threat is introduced, the alien that might try and hurt us or take our things.
We are all one human race. Despite our differences, we are one human family with just as many quirks as our own immediate family. There is no foreign element when we look into our sister’s eyes, or when we see our mother smile, there is only family, and therein is peace and comfort.
When we begin to see all people as part of our collective human experience rather than something that needs to conform to our sense of normal, we allow for diversity of thought and expression. We allow for the celebration of culture and lifestyle.
World peace starts when we stop the othering of people. It starts when we let people be who they are, how they are, and on their terms. It starts with letting normal mean everyone and not just what we know.
It starts with you.
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