Me, Myself, and the Other

I can’t just focus on one reading. I tried, but it just felt like trying to play ping-pong with myself. The readings just won’t allow me to separate them. What I mean is that they speak to each other. I used to think that I was crazy trying to link life experiences and textbook terms, comparing television shows to established academic theories. Believe me, many teachers made me feel crazy. As a said in a previous blog, much of my early education attempted to segregate cultural life aspects and educational drills. What I first thought was an appropriate separation of work and fun is now what I view as a form of otherization—a divide and conquer tactic. Separate them, and then make one superior to the other

This is the key scheme of otherization, as the Edgar and Sedgewick state in the Intercultural Communication text, that it remains as a “cultural projection of concepts” that “constructs the identities of cultural subjects through a relationship of power in which the other is the subjugated element” (93-94). Perhaps the sneakiest element of otherization is that it does acknowledge the other, but it acknowledges the other in a condescending, dismissive manner. Much like the Detroit educational system in Monroe’s Front Street chapter forbidding “street culture” to enter into the classroom, the culture of the other is known as a iniquitous part of the student’s lives (53). In this way, the ‘street culture’ is forbidden to interact with the dominant white culture and language. Divide and conquer. The other is not given voice because the other is not considered worthy to enter into the conversation.

Dominant ideologies seek a monolinguality; it fears a code switching (because it questions the supremacy of a sole ideology). But both the Front Street chapter and Lunsford’s interview with Gloria Anzaldua highlight that one’s lives and one’s writing are never tied to monolinguality. As Anzaldua notes of the other, “now I think that ‘us’ and ‘them’ are interchangeable. Now there is no such thing as the ‘other.’ The other is in you, the other is in me” (Lunsford 52). We can’t perform surgery on ourselves to take out the other (or kill off that part of us—as I mentioned last blog with the Ribeyro piece); rather, the other is in dialectic interaction with the dominant ideology. Not one or the other: both. Anzaldua says of her exercise of cultural multiplicity in her writing, “It’s a hybridity, a mixture, because I live in this liminal state in between worlds, in between realities, in between systems of knowledge, in between symbology systems” (Lunsford 65).

The dialectic continues, mostly within the self. Anzaldua discusses how we address this, but it is still a complicated issue in the classroom. Students still lean away from discovering one’s multiplicity and gravitate towards the dominant discourse because they want to get a job or they want to rid themselves of the stigma of being othered. It frustrates me that education at times is so ideologically opposed to understanding one’s social self outside of a business modal.