114: How to stop ‘Othering’ and instead ‘Build Belonging’

I had originally approached today's topic of Othering through a financial lens, as part of the series of episodes on the intersection of parenting and money (previous episodes have been on NYT Money colunist Ron Lieberman's book The Opposite of Spoiled, How to Pass on Mental Wealth to your Child, The Impact of Consumerism on Parenting, and How to Set Up A Play Room.  The series will conclude in the coming weeks with episodes on advertising and materialism).   I kept seeing questions in parenting groups: How can I teach my child about volunteering?  How can I donate the stuff we don't need without making the recipient feel less than us?   And, of course, after the Black Lives Matter movement began its recent up-swing of activity, the topic took on a new life that's more closely related to my guest's work: viewing othering through the lens of race.   My guest, Dr. John A. Powell, is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. He is the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute (formerly Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society), which supports research to generate specific prescriptions for changes in policy and practice that address disparities related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and socioeconomics in California and nationwide. In addition to being a Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor powell holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion.   Our conversation was wide-ranging and touched on a host of topics and thinkers, which I promised to track down if I could.  These include: Martha Minow's book Making All The Difference Aristotle's theory of Arithmetic and Geometric Equality Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble  Amartya Sen's idea that poverty is not a lack of stuff, but a lack of belonging Dr. Susan Fiske's work on the connection between liking and competence Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children Dr. Gordon Allport's book The Nature of Prejudice Max Weber's idea of methodological individualism The movie Trading Places (I still haven't seen it!) This blog post touches on Dr. powell's idea of the danger of allyship John Rawls' idea that citizens are reasonable and rational Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Richard Bernstein's concept of the regulative ideal   Dr. John Powell's Book

Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society (Affiliate link).

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 01:11 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In today's episode, we're going to draw together themes from a couple of different series that we've been working on over the last few months. One of these was on the intersection of Whiteness and parenting, and the other more recent one has been on the intersection of money and parenting. And one common theme across both of these topics is the idea of seeing someone who's different from you as somehow other than you. And so I'm deeply honored today to welcome Dr. John Powell, who is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties. Dr. Powell is the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California Berkeley, which supports research to generate specific prescriptions for changes in policy and practice that address disparities related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and socio economics in California and nationwide. Dr. Powell is Professor of Law and also Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. And is the author of the book Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. Welcome, Dr. Powell.   Dr. Powell 02:17 Nice to be here, Jen.   Jen 02:19 And so I should also add that we scheduled this interview way back in February, right? Because your calendar is absolutely bananas. And we're just now talking here at the beginning of May. And so to put this in context, when we scheduled this in February, COVID-19 was something that was happening in China and really didn't seem to affect us very much or like it was going to affect us very much. And here in May, obviously, we are in a very different situation. And so I think our conversation today is going to be even more powerful with this additional context of othering that we're seeing related to things like attacks on Asian Americans here in the US, as well as under counting the number of Native Americans who have the virus, and how the whole world is basically shut down for an illness that's killed a small fraction of the number of people that diarrheal diseases and tuberculosis kill every year. Although, obviously the people that those diseases typically kill is very different from the people we are seeing the highest numbers of COVID-19 cases. So I'm sure our discussion today is going to be as this backdrop. And I think it makes it even more timely and even more compelling to listen to. So, I wonder if we could maybe start with a definition because othering is, I'm guessing is a term that's not going to be so familiar to many of my listeners. So can you start by grounding us a little bit and telling us about what is othering, please.   Dr. Powell 03:33 All right, so there's, as you would expect, there are many different ways of thinking about othering and the flip side of belonging, which we'll get to, I guess early.   Jen 03:41 Mm-hmm. Certainly, will.   Dr. Powell 03:42 It comes from many different disciplines, from healthcare, from sociology, from psychology, from philosophy, from feminist studies, from political science, each one has a slightly different variation as to how they talk about it. But one way of thinking about it is just when you do not accept someone else's full humanity and full equality. The bus concept as people are not seen as grievable, or people don't count, or in some way, they're less that. So it could be because there are different levels of othering, you connect othering between husband and wife, but not gonna have genocide in that context. Whereas when you have extreme othering of some groups, it also can lead into genocide. And there’s othering that’s exploitive. So, I was young made to observation that to be superfluous is worse than to be exploited. Because when you are superfluous, you can be subject to genocide. When you're exploited, you're not likely to suffer genocide.   Jen 04:47 Because you have a use to somebody.   Dr. Powell 04:49 Right. So, there are forms of othering, but sort of broad way of thinking about it when someone is seen as less than fully equal, less than mutual, and it can add to that like maybe a threat. In some sense, we're in different slow to some ways of thinking about it.   Jen 05:07 Okay, and so I'm trying to think about this from a psychological perspective and thinking about we've talked a long time ago now about how social groups form and a big part of it seems to be about creating this difference in your mind between what is me, what is myself, and to understand that you have to have something to compare it to some kind of other, how do you integrate that psychological aspect into the definitions of othering that you work with?   Dr. Powell 05:32 Well, the psychological definitions tend to be individualistic. And whereas some other definition certainly when I talked about Judith Butler or when I talked about sociology, Steve Martinot, they’re not psychological in that sense, in the sense that one of the preconditions to think...