But recently I have come to realize that there are two parts to Othering. The first is where we imagine huge differences between us and those who seem unlike us, which makes it easier for Us to treat Them badly.

But there is another side to Othering, really the opposite side of the same coin. Maybe I should call it Anti-Othering.

To Anti-Other is to assume that no one that I know could do, think, say, believe, or be a part of whatever thing it is I find unthinkable.

To Anti-Other someone is to assume that the person sitting next to me is just like me because everyone who is not like me is clearly marked and far away.

Let me give you some examples.

My friend Yasmeen is an American Muslim. Born in Pakistan but raised in the U.S., she has a perfect American English accent; she almost always wears western clothes. She is a tiny woman with pretty brown skin and black hair who likes makeup and shopping. She is a doctor, as is her husband. One day soon after September 11 she was in a department store at a makeup counter. She was standing next to a white American who was talking to the white American behind the counter. This customer said to the saleswoman, “We should bomb all their mosques and kick those Muslims out of this country.” Then she looked at Yasmeen as if to say, “Don’t you agree?” The assumption was, “You are like me. No one I know or might even accidentally meet would be a Muslim. Especially not a small brown skinned woman wearing jeans at a Clinique counter in Louisville, Kentucky.” She’d probably be surprised to learn that there are approximately 7 million Muslims in the United States--some Asian, some African-American, some Arab, some White. Chances were good she’d run into one sooner or later—and they wouldn’t fit the profile she was carrying in her mind.

Or how about this:

My friend Helen takes her son to the daycare at her gym on a regular basis. One day she walked in to hear the daycare worker loudly exclaiming to another mother, “Can you believe these women who get abortions?” And she looked at Helen as if to say, “Really? Can you?!” And Helen could believe it, because she herself had an abortion years before.

The daycare worker couldn’t believe that any woman she knew could possibly either have had an abortion or believe that abortion was a viable and moral option for women. I’m sure she’d be shocked to find out almost half of the women in the US have an abortion some time in their lives. Chances are, not just a mom at the daycare but one of that daycare worker’s close friends had or will have an abortion.

I could go on. How about students who see me as a white woman and tell me racist jokes because they think I must be a racist because I look like them?

Or how about people who find out I’m married to a man and start talking about “those homosexuals” as if they couldn’t even fathom a world where I might disagree with homophobic views—or a world where a married person might be bisexual or gay.

I get Otherness now. I get that it is about wanting to see my part of my world as though it were full of people just like me. And wanting to be able to clearly spot anyone who isn’t like me, anyone who is Other.

The truth is, these assumptions about other people are ones that most of us make, even when we try not to. One day, on one issue or another, we assume that our dear friend or new acquaintance could not possibly hold a view different than ours or have an experience different from ours. Anyone who would disagree with us on this should be clearly marked, right? Wearing a scarlet “O” or something?

Much as we’d like the world to be clearly defined and delineated, us and them, friends and foes, lined up neatly on two sides of a field like soldiers in the American Revolution, that just isn’t our world. The Other is standing next to us--our dear friend, our sister, the woman in front of us at the grocery store. And we can’t afford to keep assuming that she is like us if she’s not clearly marked—or that she is not like us because she looks so different.

No one is exactly like us, but we are all alike in our humanity. Feminists come in all shapes, sizes, and colors with all sorts of varied and changeable beliefs. To leave behind our history of divisiveness and exclusion, we must stop assuming there is going to be agreement and instead start having real dialogue and asking real questions. We aren’t going to get any farther in our battles against racism, sexism, homophobia, fundamentalism, and hate until we begin by questioning where people are, rather than assuming we are all in the same place. Only then will we be able to measure the distance between us and recognize that if we both take a few steps we can really have a great conversation.

And it won’t be a conversation that starts with, “Can you believe those women who….?”

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