How to Achieve Belonging without Othering: A Conversation with john a. powell (Part 1)

Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.

This is part one of a two-part interview, and has been edited for length and clarity. Read the second part here.

Steve Dubb: So, your book is called Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World. That’s a pretty ambitious title. Can you begin by discussing what you and coauthor Stephen Menendian hope to accomplish?

john powell: Well, I think the world is yearning for something different. People describe it as fragmentation or polarization. We obviously describe it as othering. It’s happening at breakneck speed around the world, and it’s not without consequences.

People understand othering. They get it. People are like, “I was othered last week,” although we are talking about it at a social level. We’re talking about it at a deliberate level, where you have conflict entrepreneurs who are engaging in inciting fear about the other.

So, one of the things we tried to do in the book is really cover that ground but also look at it historically, as well as across the globe. In the United States, when people think of othering, many people think [of] it in political terms. Or in racial terms: White people othering Black people or other people of color. Maybe, if you’re a conservative, you think of White people being othered by Black people or people of color. We think that othering is about racism [or] othering is about disability.

All of those are important expressions of something that is much more insidious, much more ubiquitous. If we can understand that, maybe we can counter it.

Some writers, I would say the vast majority, when they notice this, often conclude that this is human nature—there are “in” groups and “out” groups. People naturally want to be with their own. It is almost hopeless. What can we do? People are going to hate each other.

Yet if you go back 2,000, 2,500 years ago, you see—sometimes the word, but certainly the expression of, belonging—literally sprinkled throughout almost all major religions—whether it is Confucianism, which may not even be a religion, to Hinduism to Islam—is a kernel about belonging. Sometimes it shows up as, “You are the chosen people. You belong to God.”

SD: That is definitely an in- and out-group formation.

“Can we create a world where there is belonging without othering? That’s never been in large measure attempted. And it is exactly what is needed right now.”

jp: Exactly. So, the concept of belonging—and this is how evolutionary biologists get it wrong—they say we have to belong to our tribe, and therefore, through evolutionary selection, we learned how important it is to belong.

Well, two things. One might say if that is true—and I think it is true—why do we need a book on belonging now?

What we’re saying, which is potentially both nuanced and radical, is can we imagine, can we create a world where there is belonging without othering? That’s never been in large measure attempted. And it is exactly what is needed right now.

There are a lot of reasons why it is needed now more than it was 500 years ago: then, you could live in your corner of the world. But the world is smaller now. Technology has changed all that. We know what is happening all over the world in a millisecond. In a sense, the technology has given [us] the ability to communicate and have contact with each other, which is great and creates new possibilities but also new dangers.

That’s why belonging without othering becomes paramount. We are saying something new. We are saying you’re not going to leave a group out anymore.

SD: Could you define othering and belonging? What do you mean by each of those?

jp: Like a lot of important terms, we talk about equality; we talk about freedom. I’ve spent probably too much time reading books about those. One book I just read was called Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea. The author argues that equality is incredibly complicated, and we don’t know what it means. That may be academic, except that when you look at the current US Supreme Court, some of the most important cases turn on different understandings of equality and freedom. So, it is not an academic discussion. Do you have the freedom to wear a mask? Or not wear a mask? Is that freedom? Or is that something else?

Belonging is like that. Belonging is really foundational and even preverbal. We are literally not only born into a community—we used to call it tribes or bands—we are born physically attached to another human being.

We cut the umbilical cord. But if we are healthy human beings, we never try to cut the spiritual cord. We need to belong. Social psychologists have basically said that we don’t have a self unless we have others. The African term ubuntu (“I am because we are.”) speaks to this.

Now, some people when they hear me talk about this, say, “That’s great. What about the Earth?” And I say you’re right. Two important notes: Human means “of the earth.” To really be human, to really live into our humanity, means living in concert with the Earth. And a failure to do so is what brings us to a precipice right now in terms of climate change.

Belonging means that we recognize we are in a reciprocal mutual relationship with each other and with the Earth itself. It’s not my Earth or your Earth; it’s ours. We are interrelated. The late Thich Nhat Hanh called it interbeing.

And so, it’s an aspiration. But I remind people. Some people say the most important words in US history were from a committee chaired by Thomas Jefferson, which declared, “We hold certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Now people are quick to point out that Jefferson enslaved hundreds. How could he say that? I don’t think he was just a hypocrite. He was also putting out an aspiration that continues in some way to inform who we are as a country. We may reject or embrace equality, but we can’t be indifferent toward it.

“To really be human, to really live into our humanity, means living in concert with the Earth.”Similarly, after World War II, the world’s nations came together to adopt the Declaration of Human Rights. Again, many people, including W.E.B. Du Bois, said that [it was] a fraud. People are still living as colonial subjects in segregated spaces without the right to vote. What do you mean everybody has human rights?

Again, it was an aspiration. Belonging is an aspiration that we are deeply connected to each other, which says that every human being counts, that every human being deserves dignity, to participate in cocreation of their life—bar none. Now that is belonging.

We’re saying everybody belongs. There are several different places of belonging. There is belonging in your school, in your community, at your job. And your belonging, and my belonging, should not diminish someone else’s belonging.

Not that anyone will get it right: it is an aspiration. We have to grapple with it in each generation. But it should be a beacon of how we evaluate how we are doing, how we evaluate our economics, how we evaluate our politics, how we evaluate our social interactions.

When people don’t belong, what we mean is that they aren’t accorded full dignity. There is an asterisk next to their name. Maybe they shouldn’t vote. And we certainly shouldn’t listen to them. And we don’t want them in our school. That is the danger we’re in now.

Here’s the interesting thing. Some people think othering is natural. What we say in the book is that belonging is the foundation, not othering—and people other one group in order to for them to belong to another group. Most of the othering is actually in service of belonging.

If I want to belong and I am straight—and gays are the other—I can’t like gays, because I risk getting kicked out of my group. We are trying to turn that around. So, othering is basically any time we say that someone is not being a full human being, not seen.

In religious terms, Zulu has a word sawubona, which means many things, among them: “the god in me sees the god in you.” It means I recognize that the divine in me is the same divine in you and that we are children of God. Which is a radical statement. So, the notion that we all belong to God, to Earth, to each other, has always been radical. Can we be even more radical and say not only do we belong, but everybody else belongs as well?

SD: Your book begins with the statement that “the problem of the 21st century is the problem of ‘othering.’” Beyond echoing W.E.B. Du Bois, what do you mean to communicate by that statement, and why do you hold this position?

jp: First, we wanted to expand the conversation beyond race. W.E.B. Du Bois talked about the color line. In the United States, especially, people think about these problems in racial terms.

As we travel the world, some places don’t even talk about race. So, India doesn’t specifically organize society around race, but it does organize itself around caste and Hinduism versus Islam. There is an othering process, one could argue, that is just as pernicious in India as racism and enslavement in the United States.

Mahatma Gandhi, when India was becoming a country, worried that the separating of Indians who were Muslim and Indians who were Hindu and Buddhist was a very serious problem. He literally talked about it in terms of othering. There is a book called Beyond Othering, which is about India and how people were separated.

In South Africa, there is a whole issue of tribal separation—it’s still going on. One of the corruptions in South Africa is that how you do politically and how you do in terms of your work depends on what tribe you are.

When you go to Russia and people talk about “real Russians” and Ukrainians don’t exist as a people, you see this othering process happening in other forms.

You might miss it if you think just in terms of racism or sexism. It is part of a larger process. It is a process that is used specifically by right-wing authoritarian leaders today.

SD: The United States—and arguably, according to Oxfam and others, the world—has record levels of economic inequality right now. Yet I was struck that when I read the book, economic inequality and capitalism are pretty conspicuous in their absence. There was a little on globalization, but it was definitely not a major theme, except perhaps as a background condition to othering. What led to that choice?

“One reason that the 21st century is about othering is that our sense of who we are is being called into question.”

jp: I think liberals and progressives in the United States understandably focus on material inequality, and it is important. Although I argue that material inequality is the result of [the] othering I am talking about. That you can’t fix that, [can’t] have social policies that attend to people who are marginalized if you don’t see those people as people.

Literally, there is strong evidence, empirical evidence, that many people in the United States—especially as it relates to certain groups, including Black Americans and homeless people—don’t see those people as people. They simply won’t adopt social policies. In fact, they will adopt social policies that hurt themselves in order to hurt those people.

Also, it is not synonymous with what we’re talking about. In Indonesia, [the] Chinese are economically the most well-off group, but politically and culturally, they are not. So, it is complicated.

So, we actually try to break people out of a narrow materialistic understanding of othering. We’re not saying materialism is irrelevant. We’re saying the problem is more profound than that. In some ways, we think of it as an ontological problem. One reason that the 21st century is about othering is that our sense of who we are is being called into question.

Now, can you have belonging with extreme inequality and capitalism? No, you cannot. You have to address that. If you take belonging seriously, it does challenge at least Anglo-American capitalism. Because belonging is predicated on the notion of cocreation. Everybody counts. It challenges not only capitalism but the way we do our democracy—if we have a democracy. In some points, it challenges the nation-state, and it certainly challenges the ethnic nation-state.

SD: You do discuss truth and reconciliation processes, but you don’t directly say much about the growing movements in the United States and elsewhere for reparations. Repair could be thought of, certainly, as an element of belonging. From a belonging framework, how should we think about claims for reparations?

jp: [What] we are trying to do is create something that everyone can see themselves in. And we think that many of the ways that we discuss harm valorizes some harm and ignores others. So, we actually end up having a zero-sum game, where we are figuring out whose story of suffering counts, who gets to tell their story, and who gets to have repair based on their story. We think, frankly, every group has the right to belong. And it is forward thinking—not just backwards thinking assumption. That complicates it.

We are one of the intellectual homes for the reparations task force in California. We were in constant conversation with them. Yes, we talk about targeted universalism, so we recognize that groups are situated unevenly. We recognize that there is a hierarchy. We recognize that there is domination. But it is not categorical. So, it doesn’t mean that all Black people are suffering post-traumatic slave syndrome. It doesn’t mean that all White people are White supremacists. It is much more complicated than that.

Our goal is not to indict White people or to get Black people reprieve. It is to say: every group, what do they need to belong? In some cases, it might be reparations. But it might be reparations that goes beyond enslavement.

One thing I say to people is I think based on US history and the US Constitution (as reflected in the 13th through 15th amendments), there was intent by the second group of founders because, as Eric Foner says, there are really two constitutions. The second constitution was definitely designed to address not just suffering but suffering caused by slavery. There are early cases in which the Supreme Court says, effectively, that the 14th Amendment is not about White people; it is about Black people. That’s not where we are now.

SD: Yes, it’s been used to establish rights for corporations, but that’s a different story.

jp: I’ve written about that in other places. But I’m trying to actually open up a space. One of our greatest failures is the ability to imagine a world where everyone belongs.

If we do imagine that future, it may require that we rethink wealth inequality in the United States. It may require that we rethink how we vote. It may require looking at things like reparations. But if you lead with those things, you might never get to belonging.

But once you take belonging seriously and get down to programs and policy, which is not what the book is about, all those things come to the fore.

SD: You note that backlash is almost an inevitable consequence of any movement for belonging. How should movements for belonging seek to anticipate and mitigate this backlash response?

jp: Most backlashes, especially now, are strategic. The conflict entrepreneurs are looking for ways to excite people’s fears and resentment, especially when it’s a populist backlash. Marginalized groups don’t have the wherewithal to mount an effective backlash.

But Whites can. The ultimate fear from the backlash is a fear of not belonging. So, when the Proud Boys chant, “We will not be replaced,” what are they saying? They are saying [they] have this anxiety that Jews or some group are going to displace them, and they are not going to belong. Of course, there is no indication that Jews are interested in replacing Proud Boys or White Christians generally, but that does not matter because these stories are not based on facts but on deep [gut] feelings that are exploited by the elites.

So, one of the things to be clear is that in a world where everybody belongs, there is a place for White people. So sometimes when we talk about racial justice, even gender justice, we talk about it in a way that only focuses on the claims and injuries and suffering of our group. In some ways, there is a reason to emphasize that, but not be exclusive.

What the conflict entrepreneurs do is say this affirmative action stuff, equity stuff, is really about hating White people. It’s not. But there is enough confusion that that claim seems to make sense.

And I tell you, sometimes I struggle with some of the people in the social justice, racial justice movement to say, yes, we have to be concerned and not just strategically but morally concerned with White people, with Asian people. And some people say, “No.” I think that is fundamentally a mistake.

What I am saying is that we have to be grounded in our values. People will still come after us. But when I say I care about everybody, including low-income Whites and Native Americans and people I haven’t even met, I’m serious. That’s [what] we have to be clear about.

They can still come after us. There was a school district a couple of years ago that contacted me. They had been attacked by some right-wing MAGA people for instituting a racial justice curriculum that talked about White supremacy, White superiority, White dominance, and White nationalism.

The plaintiffs argued that the school district was making White children feel guilt. And there was a lawsuit. And the school district was nervous. They asked, “Can you help?” I said, “Send me the curriculum.” They did, and I changed it. And I sent it back to them.

I said your curriculum is challenging the notion that any group should dominate. Your group is challenging the notion not of White superiority alone but the notion of superiority. Then you can go a little deeper, a little more granular, and say, in the United States, many of these superiority movements have been organized by Whites in the name of White superiority. But you make a general claim that you’re against the notion that one group should dominate. Let them argue in court that Whites are superior. That’s a case you want to be involved in. They made those changes, and the plaintiffs dropped the lawsuit.

You need to be clear that you do care about everybody and recognize at the same time that people are not situated exactly the same. But if you focus on one group, it doesn’t mean you’re excluding your concern for the other. That’s how you deal with the backlash.