Hate isn’t about the need to suppress “bad apples.” Discrimination is too often justified on the basis of obnoxious behavior by a few members of a group. Hate and oppression is the result of “othering,” perceiving others as different from oneself in appearance, culture, or beliefs. Othering is the root of everything from genocide to religious persecution. It’s cultivated by despots in order to acquire and hold power. It’s embraced by individuals as a means of self-validation. When we “other,” we’re saying, “I’m good because you’re bad. I’m valuable because you’re not.”
Discriminatory and violent policing of African Americans has been justified by some with the observation that black people commit more crimes. That they are more often arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for crimes is at least as much a result of this perception as of an actual increase in crime rate. And any real increase in crime rate among this population is a direct outgrowth of desperate economic circumstances. Poor people may be driven to steal to feed their families. Rich people steal for greed or sport.
Expelling Mexicans from our country has been justified by pointing out high profile crimes by immigrants or by naming high profile gangs. Their real offense, however, in the eyes of the haters is looking and sounding different. White males have committed many horrible crimes, including serial killings, domestic acts of terror, and many acts of sexual aggression. Heavily armed gangs of white males have created civil unrest that targets minorities with sometimes lethal results. White collar crime is a euphemism for stealing from others by gaming the system. Should we therefore propose to expel all white males in order to eliminate these threats?
Rwanda is an object lesson in othering. In the early part of the 20th century, Belgian colonialists taught half the population of Rwanda to hate the other half. They began by defining the physical characteristics that they claimed distinguished Hutus from Tutsis and assigned official racial identities to every Rwandan. No matter that these distinctions were so arbitrary that even members of the same family were often assigned different racial identities. They then set up a power structure based on these distinctions that bred such resentment that it resulted in two genocides within half a century. Epithets, such as “cockroach,” were one of the tools with which Hutus were encouraged to despise their Tutsi neighbors. And when the last genocide was over, the veil of hate lifted somewhat, and many of the perpetrators were horrified to realize what they’d done to their former neighbors, friends, and even family members.
Science fiction uses gruesome imagery to spotlight the threat of aliens from other worlds, a metaphor for the enduring othering pervading human culture. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a particularly poignant example in which the enemy is an insect-like race designated the “buggers” and presumed to be bent on our destruction. The title character grows up to realize that he’s been instrumental in the genocide of a noble race of creatures that were just trying to defend themselves from us. And we can expect that sentient AIs risk becoming the next underclass to be oppressed upon the assumption that they mean harm to carbon-based humans.
Lest we go down the path of Rwanda and of Nazi Germany, we must call out othering for what it is and renounce it. It’s time we realized that we’re all more alike than different, right down to our genomes. It’s time to correct the inequities in circumstances and opportunities in our culture and the inequities in how we treat one another. It’s time to replace hate with compassion.
Discriminatory and violent policing of African Americans has been justified by some with the observation that black people commit more crimes. That they are more often arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for crimes is at least as much a result of this perception as of an actual increase in crime rate. And any real increase in crime rate among this population is a direct outgrowth of desperate economic circumstances. Poor people may be driven to steal to feed their families. Rich people steal for greed or sport.
Expelling Mexicans from our country has been justified by pointing out high profile crimes by immigrants or by naming high profile gangs. Their real offense, however, in the eyes of the haters is looking and sounding different. White males have committed many horrible crimes, including serial killings, domestic acts of terror, and many acts of sexual aggression. Heavily armed gangs of white males have created civil unrest that targets minorities with sometimes lethal results. White collar crime is a euphemism for stealing from others by gaming the system. Should we therefore propose to expel all white males in order to eliminate these threats?
Rwanda is an object lesson in othering. In the early part of the 20th century, Belgian colonialists taught half the population of Rwanda to hate the other half. They began by defining the physical characteristics that they claimed distinguished Hutus from Tutsis and assigned official racial identities to every Rwandan. No matter that these distinctions were so arbitrary that even members of the same family were often assigned different racial identities. They then set up a power structure based on these distinctions that bred such resentment that it resulted in two genocides within half a century. Epithets, such as “cockroach,” were one of the tools with which Hutus were encouraged to despise their Tutsi neighbors. And when the last genocide was over, the veil of hate lifted somewhat, and many of the perpetrators were horrified to realize what they’d done to their former neighbors, friends, and even family members.
Science fiction uses gruesome imagery to spotlight the threat of aliens from other worlds, a metaphor for the enduring othering pervading human culture. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a particularly poignant example in which the enemy is an insect-like race designated the “buggers” and presumed to be bent on our destruction. The title character grows up to realize that he’s been instrumental in the genocide of a noble race of creatures that were just trying to defend themselves from us. And we can expect that sentient AIs risk becoming the next underclass to be oppressed upon the assumption that they mean harm to carbon-based humans.
Lest we go down the path of Rwanda and of Nazi Germany, we must call out othering for what it is and renounce it. It’s time we realized that we’re all more alike than different, right down to our genomes. It’s time to correct the inequities in circumstances and opportunities in our culture and the inequities in how we treat one another. It’s time to replace hate with compassion.
