under the heading "too much time in the car"

My paper on Moby Dick is about one of the minor characters, a vaguely middle-eastern man named Fedallah. He's so rarely a part of the action that he is almost a place holder, but he plays an important role. As is common in nineteenth century lit, his stereotyped eastern-ness (dark, passionate, mysterious) is used as a foil for the Westerners' rational forthrightness. And since he is aligned with Ahab, he serves to reinforce the sense that Ahab is insane.

This way of using an imaginary, made-up version of Middle Eastern people to emphasize (by contrast) the desirable characteristics of the West is called Orientalism.  It's based on the idea of psychological 'othering.'   You take the characteristics you don't want to acknowledge in yourself and project them onto someone who is 'other' and then you don't have to see those traits in yourself.  So slave owners projected onto their slaves that they were bestial, with uncontrollable sexual urges and limited intelligence.  Or colonizers would see indigenous peoples as barbaric, uncivilized, and in need of help.  And it isn't necessarily negative-- men saw women as sweet, nurturing, domestic creatures who were too weak and irrational to function in the business world.  This provides two advantages to the person who is doing the 'othering':  you can ignore those traits in yourself (because you aren't one of them, and they are the ones with those traits), and you can rationalize treating them like crap because they deserve it.

There is lots more you could say about this, and books have been written about it.  Lots of them.  Shelves of them.  And I've only read a few dozen pages about it, so I'm hardly an expert, and why am I telling you this?  Only because I was thinking about it in the car yesterday.

anyway.  The funny thing about 'othering' is that you tend to cling doggedly to these 'othering' beliefs even when your experience tells you otherwise.  Even when a nineteenth century man had experienced in the schoolroom that his sister was smarter than he was, he would still assume that she was in a completely different category than any man, and was incapable of understanding politics, philosophy, or finance.  Even when a white slave owner was regularly having sex with several different slave women, he would still assume that he was not as bestial as the slaves, because he is a white man and white men are in a different category than slaves, who have uncontrollable urges.

When you're outside the system, it's infuriating, because it's so obviously not true.  But when you're in the system, it's just the way things are.  And of course we still do this today.  You can identify some of them (conservatives assuming that liberals have no morals, ignoring some pretty dang scandalous actions of their own; liberals assuming that conservatives are cold, calculating, and profit-driven, but see numerous liberals who have made extremely lucrative, profitable careers out of feeding that belief; romance novels that depict gypsy/Native American/Italian heroes as being hyper-sexualized; someone who is homophobic being utterly certain that a gay teacher will try to convert their children, etc), but for the most part, we're probably unaware of the ways we do this.  We can't see it, because we're inside the system, and it just seems like The Way It Is.

But what I was thinking about yesterday is the way we do this on a personal level.  The way I do this on a personal level.  I can't exercise because I'm not "athletic," you have to be An Athlete to be athletic.  Athleticism belongs to a group of people of which I am not a member.  Ignoring the fact that at several different times in my life, I've done athletic things and enjoyed them.  Or:  I can't be expected to give a talk in front of a group because I'm not a public speaker.  I get nervous and sweaty and my mind goes blank and I have nothing to say.  All of which is true.  And yet I remembered the other day that I once got up in front of my entire 100+ member high school band and gave a devotional before we went on a trip, and hardly felt nervous at all.  (doesn't that just say how old I am?  back in the days when you still did things like that at a public school in the Bible belt.)

So part of this is just about the ways we limit ourselves by coming to some conclusion based on one set of experiences and ignoring others.  I'll never be athletic the way some of my friends are or the way Dean is, but I'm more capable of it than I give myself credit for.  I'll never be a public speaker, and I don't want to be, but I can do it.