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“We shape ourselves to fit this world, and by the world are shaped again.” — David Whyte
While blaming the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the other, for society’s ills is an age-old tactic devised to divide us and shift focus away from who is really hoarding power and wealth, one should wonder why it is still so effective. How are we so easily fooled? Or is it that fear engulfs people into a collective amnesia where we happily grasp for simplistic narratives?
When we examine the work done to counter this othering, however, we also mostly see age-old strategies. We are doing what Audre Lorde warned us against: we are using the master’s tools to try to dismantle the master’s house.
Government programmes or civil society campaigns often focus on the idea of integration, that the newcomers must be supported, or guided, or taught about the host country in order that they can fit into the house, so that they can adapt.
We must ask, however: integration into what? Into a static, monolithic culture that demands the newcomer shed their skin to fit?
What we might think leads to inclusion is more often a form of erasure and extraction.
It asks newcomers to leave their past, their culture, their histories, their differences behind. They must curate themselves, sanitise themselves in order that they become palatable to the host.
Some initiatives preach tolerance, but advocating for the mere tolerance of difference is inadequate, Audre Lorde writes, as it denies the creative function that difference has in our lives. Difference “must be seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
Another suggestion we often hear is that we should teach empathy; teach people to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, to try to imagine we are them. But this is not an effective strategy (as we have said before); empathy is biased and it asks of the other that they perform.
To be deserving of empathy, they must fit into what Mohammed El-Kurd calls the perfect victim. To belong to the human condition, they must fit into a stereotype of a victim that can perform their trauma for the host gaze. They have to enact their humanity.
“It is the ceaseless infantilisation of the dehumanised subject,” El-Kurd writes, “for the spectators to sympathise with ‘the other,’ they must first sanitise and subdue him, sever him from his origin story, rendering him ‘utterly displaced and effaced.’”
It should never be those who are dehumanised who have to do the work of rehumanising themselves. Similarly, our initiatives or campaigns that focus on trying to humanise the other – ‘look, they too suffer when their children are ripped by bombs!’ – in fact, contribute to maintaining this system of supremacy.
The problem lies, always, with those who dehumanise. Most of the time, that is us, in the host country, the colonial west, those of us who benefit from the extraction of natural resources, of culture, of human resources. Those of us who still think, deep down, that they should be so lucky to reach our shores, to learn our values.
Nobody should have to integrate, in fact, it is we, the hosts, who should outegrate (yes, we are inventing a new word!).
Outegration is an opening, an expansion, a transformation, a process by which we all move from our positions. If we think about nature, for example, it is diversity; it adapts, grows, expands, changes, it creates new paths, new life. Monocultures, on the other hand, decay and eventually die. A world of sameness is an impoverished world.
Outegration is a process by which society expands its own cultural, political and imaginative boundaries to make space for difference, for others, instead of forcing people to shed their differences, to erase part of themselves to fit into a monochrome house, we expand outward to meet the margins.
Borders and nationalities, for example, are a recent invention and need not be permanent. In Immanuel Kant’s concept of perpetual peace (which later inspired international treaties and policies on refugee rights and freedom of movement) he argued for the common possession of the land, because no one has more right to any specific patch of land than another. We are caretakers of these lands.
Connected to that, was the idea of universal hospitality, where Kant believed that people should not be treated with hostility in other lands. This concept, in turn, informed Hannah Arendt’s arguments for rejecting empathy and compassion as political strategies.
She argued instead for understanding and visiting. Instead of trying to mold people to fit into our worldviews, we should visit theirs; what she calls ‘going visiting.’
We shouldn’t try to erase differences or pretend there are no differences, we should recognise plurality, understand that there are different perspectives, without having to agree with them or feel like we are the same. This requires us to train our minds and imagination.
By building these new connections, we create interdependency. Audre Lorde suggests that “only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
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References
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Audre Lorde. Essay in Sister Outsider. You can also read it online here.
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, Mohammed El-Kurd.
"Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," Immanuel Kant's (1795).
On Revolution, Hannah Arendt.
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Hannah Arendt.
The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt.
Further Resources
‘Left Is Not Woke with Susan Neiman,’ Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps, 14 February 2023. More here.
‘Integration and assimilation.’ Words Matter, Migrant Rights Network. Read here.
‘Black lives matter, But to whom? Why We Need a Politics of Exile in a Time of Troubling Stuckness (Part I).’ Bayo Akomolafe, Democracy and Belonging Forum, 19 January 2023, read here.
Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe.
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into an idea, then into more tangible action.”— Audre Lorde
“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. … Acceptance of the lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.” — Hannah Arendt
“To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” — E.E. Cummings
Xenophile (n.): A person who has a love of foreign people and culture; A person with an interest in celebrating people's differences.
“The vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community.” — Hannah Arendt
