Us vs. them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’ – and how to avoid them

john a. powell writes for and Ian Haney López quoted in The Guardian, Nov. 8, 2017

The opposite of Othering is not “saming”, it is belonging. And belonging does not insist that we are all the same. It means we recognise and celebrate our differences, in a society where “we the people” includes all the people.

In the United States, politicians used to engage in what scholar Ian Haney-Lopez calls “dog whistles” – they could make references to Others but only in a coded way; never saying “those Mexicans” or “those Muslims”, for example.