People who “fat shame” others are often projecting their own unhealthy lifestyles and eating habits onto people they perceive as bigger. When people use slurs against members of the LGBTQ + community, they are often projecting their own sexual and gendered insecurities on their fellow brothers and sisters with different preferences. Labeling easily scapegoated people as lazy often reveals the shame people feel about their own indolence. When privileged academics call certain people racists, they are often projecting their own repressed racism onto other people. Parroting the phrase “diversity is our strength,” liberals, for example, often project their intolerance onto others who refuse to virtue signal empty words. Projection relates to othering. In the early 20th century, as a friend reminded me, the great sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about how black people experienced a sense of otherness and exclusion in the United States. It’s a problem that perhaps all people experience in a highly divided, hierarchal society. Du Bois said:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of the other, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder…
While Du Bois was describing the feelings of being both an American and a black person, many people experience these feelings of two-ness. People often make other people feel like outsiders, inferiors, and the “other,” because of their social class, immigration status, sexual orientation, racial and ethnic identity, or some other category. Many immigrants experience this sense of two-ness today with feelings of being both a member of their original culture and an American. My family has experienced this being Cuban-Americans.
In today’s political climate, perhaps police officers also sense this feeling of two-ness, for example, being a stereotyped cop and a community member or being a police officer and a woman or black/brown person.
We all project and “other” people; police officers too. So do professors. I’ve seen many privileged professors engage in projection and othering towards their colleagues making them feel like outsiders, inferior, and the “other.”
Those who point the finger the most are often most guilty. Most important, we must also ask ourselves the following:
How often do you tell stories that turn others into your inferior? How often do you make people feel like outsiders?
How often do you “other” other people based on some category?
Asking such questions, I realized how I’ve “othered” rural people while living for the first time in a small-town rural setting. I work hard to avoid repeating this process.
If police officers realize how they are constantly subject to projection and othering, it becomes easier to recognize how they also do it. I believe police officers can become better than the vast majority of people who constantly project their shadows and “other” people. Police officers can rise above the proverbial muck and mire to become great examples of people who protect human rights, even during highly difficult times when the public has intensified their projection and othering.
