(Hopefully this will be a worth it text block). I will divide this according to the sections the author has made in the original article.
The intro was clear in analyzing the problem. That throughout history and especially recent history, we have been secluding and segregating people based on class, religion, nationality and such. And that through recent history, even the ever-expanding sub-cultures within the west have been in the same treatment as the “othered”. Yet, this article seems to analyze things with very weird contexts. For example, that Barack Obama did not use the word “islamic” in his speech, knowing how much it can be a trigger or more fuel for the rising American far right. Yet, Barack Obama has deported more immigrants and refugees than Trump. Showing a contradiction with the article, implying that Obama did not betray the American dream like Trump, while in reality, Obama was able to betray the American dream without anyone even realizing! The difference is Obama did it way better than Trump, if you excuse my Arabic, ” Be sheyaka aktar”. That was my main issue with the introduction. Other than that, the definition of “othering” was on point and even referred to socioeconomic status, which I thought will be the main point here, but I was unfortunately left disappointed.
I. Demagoguery and Power
The author starts with examples of movements and influential readers that were able to influence people into segregating others, this was definitely useful and needed to be included. The best example, that the author, for some reason, failed to mention was the Dreyfus affair that started in 1896, which divided the French Republic in views until 1906. The Dreyfus affair started when Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was arrested for charges of espionage and leaking French army documents to the Germans. This led to the French Republic citizens launching anti-semitic rants and attacks on Jews. Even though this was after the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, where legal emancipation was brought to minorities, including Jews. However, since this was only legal emancipation and not technically social emancipation, it only took one instance for France to abandon what it believed in and attack the Jews. This was reflected well in the article, but one thing raised my eyebrows, when the author mentions Aristotle and warning of demagogues, which is of course fine. However, Aristotle was a student of Plato, and one of Plato’s main utopian ideas was to create a perfect society, in which the rulers are philosophers, and the masses do not partake in the decision making. Isn’t this an example of segregation and the ‘othering’ but not from a social class or religious perspective, but from subjective intellectuality? Shouldn’t we examine the source of this inequality, back before any sort of ‘civilization’ for clear analysis?
II. The Mechanics of Othering
This is the part where I thought I would be most excited at, but was left disappointed. The author is introducing us to how we ‘group’ ourselves and through this grouping we tend to separate ourselves from ‘others’. The author then gives examples of this grouping, from markets to unconscious bias. Here is where the problem is, why is this author, examining ‘othering’ from the perspective of the markets? Allow me to further clarify, why is the author examining the markets itself, when the author should know that the markets are based on ‘othering’ and segregation? The invisible hand of the free market does not care for words such as ‘belonging’ or ‘othering’, but cares for production, supply, demand and profit. It only makes sense that through the invisible hand of the free market, does not care for equality and equity, but cares only for Capitalism. Even when employers try to create an equal work force and promote ‘belonging’, they only do it for self interest and not for society. This is an example of what philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls Capitalism with a Human Face. Allow me to give an example, so I can nullify this argument of any attempted ‘Market Belonging’. A good example would be Apartheid 1980s South Africa, billionaires like George Soros, and transnational companies, criticized existing South African companies for not having equal pay between White people and Black people. These billionaires claimed that the abolishment of economic segregation is equally important as the political struggle itself. Is this not an ideal case of the overlapping between the struggle for political freedom and corporate interests? The same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa. This begs the question: Aren’t the interests of billionaires like George Soros, more powerful than any idea of ‘belonging’ in market forces? This also begs the question, for the sake of belonging and equality, shouldn’t our scope be expanded beyond the markets?
When one mentions socioeconomic classes into topics of inequality and segregation, we usually find names such as Karl Marx and like-minded sociologists. Especially when examining inequality under Capitalism and from an analytical perspective. The same when analyzing dictatorships or totalitarian societies, it is common to mention Hannah Arendt and her famous The Origins of Totalitarianism, which has proved to be quite sufficient of how dictators with fallacious arguments are able to segregate a certain segment of society. For example, if we analyze Trump from the perspective of Hannah Arendt and Slavoj Zizek (for the argument to be nuanced), we will find that Trump to be compared to far right dictators is an over exaggeration. Trump is a horrible person, a racist and a sexist, but to be compared to Hitler is definitely an exaggeration; Trump has only been doing what the US administration has been doing for years with imperialist foreign policies, just in a more radical accelerated way.
To get back on the point of Marx, we should analyze our indifferences through the class struggle! Why is there no mention of early Soviet Union? Before Stalin and his goons took over? Why is there no mention that the first successful attempt of equality, the right of women to be divorced, the right of women to the same employment as men, the right of blacks to be equal as whites and Jewish emancipation was achieved by the Soviet Union? Why is there no mention of any of this? Why in analyzing culture belonging and ‘othering’, why do we not see past success and failures of the East? Isn’t analyzing things purely from a Western perspective, creates a sense of ‘othering’ from an academic perspective? Wouldn’t this be the ultimate unconscious bias?
III. Expanding the Circle of Human Concern
There is a huge amount of secessionism, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but is important to analyze for multicultural societies. For example, in multicultural societies such as Canada, some groups prefer to sit with each other based on national identity and ethnicity (such as Asian students hanging out with other Asian students). Nothing wrong with that at all, just interesting to analyze in societies that try their upmost best to persuade other cultures to participate in society. There isn’t much I disagreed with in this section, but also not much that I didn’t know about.
Experimental Music archives 