Thus Spake the Other | The Frontline Newsletter

“I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes…”

Dear reader,

This is the opening stanza of “I, Too” by Langston Hughes, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. As you can see, the poem speaks powerfully about racial inequality, identity, exclusion, and, of course, resistance.

Obviously, Hughes’ kitchen is more than a room. It’s a metaphor for the spaces where societies have historically banished those deemed different, dangerous, “disgusting” or simply inconvenient. The act of sending someone to eat in the kitchen when company comes is “othering” in its most domestic, mundane form. Yet this simple gesture contains the entire infrastructure of exclusion.

The term “othering” itself is relatively recent, coined in academic circles, but the practice is as old as the first human who pointed at their neighbour and said, “That one’s not like us”. It’s the psychological and social process by which we create an “us” by defining a “them”—turning human beings into simplified categories that justify everything from mild social awkwardness to genocide.

Edward Said’s groundbreaking 1978 work Orientalism, which we read mainly as a critique of Western scholarship, also told us about how knowledge itself could become a weapon of othering. Said showed how European scholars created an entire academic discipline around the idea that the “East” was fundamentally different: exotic, mysterious, backwards, and, crucially, in need of Western guidance. The Orient became not a place but a projection, a screen onto which the West could project its own fantasies and fears.

What made Said’s analysis so devastating was how he showed that this prejudice was dressed up as objective scholarship, complete with footnotes and university chairs. The “Oriental” was constructed as eternally different, trapped in time, unable to speak for themselves. It was othering with a PhD.

The academic othering had real-world consequences. As Said noted: “Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” The knowledge produced in European universities justified colonial rule, military intervention, and economic exploitation. The Orient needed to be managed, civilised, and controlled. For its own good, of course.

Frantz Fanon, writing from his experience as a Black psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, understood othering from the inside out. In Black Skin, White Masks, he described the psychological violence of being constantly seen as Other. “When people like me, they like me ‘in spite of my colour’. When they dislike me; they point out that it isn’t because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.”

The Black person, Fanon said, was forced to see themselves through white eyes, to internalise the very gaze that diminished them. This created what Fanon called a “sociogenic” trauma. In simple words, this is psychological damage inflicted not by individual pathology but by social structure itself.

This is why the kitchen where Hughes’ darker brother eats alone becomes a state of mind, a way of understanding oneself as fundamentally displaced from the main table of humanity.

Simone de Beauvoir, writing in 1949, identified perhaps the oldest form of systematic othering: the construction of woman as man’s Other. She argued that women had been cast as humanity’s permanent Other, defined not by what they were, but by what they were not. Unlike other forms of othering, which affect specific groups, the othering of women cuts across societies, classes, and racial categories. The othering is so foundational that it often becomes invisible, like the air we breathe.

Language has always been both the tool and the battlefield of othering. Each era develops its own vocabulary of exclusion. The colonial period gave us “civilised” versus “savage”, “developed” versus “primitive”. The modern era refined these categories into more subtle distinctions: “democratic” versus “authoritarian”, “modern” versus “traditional”, “rational” versus “emotional”.

But language also carries within it the seeds of resistance. Hughes’ poem itself is an act of linguistic reclamation. By declaring “I, too, sing America,” he refuses the grammar of othering that would exclude him from national belonging (a theme you see resonating in this piece by Ashutosh Sharma on poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz). Hughes’ darker brother claims his place not just in the kitchen, but in the song itself.

Perhaps most importantly, we must understand that othering is not just psychological or cultural. It’s economic. Every form of systematic othering serves someone’s material interests. Colonialism extracted wealth from the colonised. Sexism provides cheap or free female labour. Racism creates a reserve army of disposable workers. The digital platforms that other us algorithmically do so in service of advertising revenues and data extraction.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of refugees in Strangers at Our Door reveals how othering adapts to global capitalism. In a world of mobile capital and immobile labour, the refugee becomes the perfect Other (ask Donald Trump!)—someone whose very existence reminds us of our own precarity while justifying new forms of border enforcement and surveillance.

The digital revolution promised to break down barriers, to create a global village where difference could be celebrated rather than feared. Instead, it has created new and more sophisticated forms of othering.

We are now all subject to an algorithmic othering. The platform decides who sees what content, who gets which advertisements, who receives loan offers, and who gets stopped by facial recognition software. As Safiya Umoja Noble told us in Algorithms of Oppression, search engines embed racial and gender bias into the very infrastructure of information.

The digital Other is not sent to eat in the kitchen; they are simply filtered out of feeds or shadow-banned. The kitchen has become algorithmic.

Yet the digital age has also created new possibilities for resistance. The same platforms that enable algorithmic othering also allow marginalised communities to find each other, create new vocabularies, and challenge dominant narratives. The #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and countless other digital organising efforts, despite their flaws, were all about attempts to reclaim the power to define oneself rather than be defined by others.

Like Hughes’ poem, which ends with a promise:

“Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.”

It’s a vision of inclusion, but also a threat. The darker brother will not ask permission to join the table—he will simply sit down. This is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of the long history of othering—its ultimate failure. Every attempt to permanently fix someone as Other eventually breaks down. The kitchen door doesn’t hold. The boundaries change. New forms of resistance emerge. New languages emerge.

I saw an example of this in Tamil Nadu recently when Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced that the term “colony”, a word used to designate the spaces where Dalit communities live, would be banned officially. In this interesting and insightful interview,Tamil writer Imayam speaks of how that one word carries the weight of caste, history, and humiliation, and why its erasure is a step towards healing.

Clearly, Hughes’ brother is no longer waiting for tomorrow. He’s pulling up a chair.

Wishing you a lovely week ahead,

Jinoy Jose P.

Digital Editor, Frontline

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