The Danger of the "Other"

 This morning I was listening to Tom Morello's "One Man Revolution" radio show, and he was talking about an incident when he was a kid where the KKK had left a noose on his garage. It frightened him for a long time. This story was part of the larger narrative of the show which was centered around Juneteenth. Towards the end, he played the song "Fuck Tha Police" by NWA, which I have heard before, but I guess I hadn't really listened to the words. Today I did. I was struck by the anger at being constantly "othered" by police, and the infuriating relevance of the message these many years later. 

I can't blame them for their anger. I can't fault them for their mistrust of this system that continues, even now, to hold them apart from society and prevent them from being fully included. That targets their safety, their lives, their communities. The amount of generational trauma that we as a society continue to inflict because we fear an "other" is disgusting. And despite the many good, honest, ethical, compassionate cops that I know, fuck the police as a racist, unjust system that targets anyone it deems as "other" and especially those who are not white men. 

I have had a few conversations recently about an ongoing crisis within the United Methodist Church. The debate rages on about the inclusion of LGBTQIA persons in the life and ministry of the UMC. Some of us argue that by failing to ordain people who are LGBTQIA, or to marry them, that we are excluding them and sending the message that they are not welcomed into our congregations. Well, maybe their volunteer hours or their money, but not their full persons. Others argue that they are perfectly welcome to attend, they just can't participate in these areas because, you know, sin, or something. And really, this is just the church "othering" someone. Looking with suspicion and mistrust on a group of people, and deciding to exclude them from full participation in the life of the church. However you want to parse it semantically, the result is the same. 

So I cannot blame people who are LGBTQIA, or those who support them, from leaving churches (not just the UMC) in droves. And what responsibility do we, as individuals, bear for continuing to prop up a system that others and dehumanizes these persons? There are many sins we can lay at the feet of religion, but the fact remains, religion does not exist without us, and these sins are ours. The othering, whether done by us or not, is tolerated by us, and therefore propagated by us. So I cannot blame any who look with suspicion, and hostility, on my faith or any other. 

I have never ending conversations about those who find themselves without a home, who are suffering from chronic, debilitating mental and/or physical illnesses. Those who are often "othered" in some other way, in addition to the serious crime of being poor and without housing. It is so easy to scapegoat these people. To look at them and see a threat, to see danger. The fact that they are often already viewed as "other" because of their race, their sexual identity or orientation, their lack of wealth, well...clearly they deserve this. They must. They are dangerous "others" and we need to make sure we hold them down, and never let them forget that they do not belong and their suffering is their own fault. 

This is the danger of "other." The dominant culture will discard, abuse, shame, dehumanize, and destroy anything it perceives as a threat, as other than itself. And the rest of us are all others in this system. We are all inches away from exclusion, from persecution, from the violence that is a feature of the system, not a flaw in it. These systems were designed to protect the power of one group to the detriment and degradation of all others. And it works by constantly giving us an "other" to scapegoat. Someone to point at and blame for the ills of society. Thugs, degenerates, lowlifes, crazies, druggies, whores, criminals, perverts. If we keep looking at the others, if we keep pointing our anger and rage at those who are different, then this unjust, broken, violent system continues. 

I don't want to be part of a society that says leaving a noose on a child's house is okay, or that we will take your time and money but you aren't really welcome here, or you deserve all of your misery because you are poor and sick. I am disgusted by the notion that wealth somehow indicates the value of a person, that skin color means anything beyond how much melanin you produce, that your sexual orientation or identity has anything to do with how worthy of love and acceptance you are. I am angry, and sick at heart, and utterly fed up.