In The Origin of Others, published by Harvard University Press in 2017, Toni Morrison combines literary criticism, historical analysis, and memoir to examine America’s preoccupation with skin color as the defining factor of the self and others. Drawing on her Charles Eliot Norton lectures, she highlights different aspects of the preoccupation with race and what they reveal about the process and impact of “Othering.” In short, it is a degrading process to both those who receive its social and political benefits and to those whom it exiles. She demonstrates that literature has been both a constructive and destructive force in conveying ideas about race and belonging and that the process of Othering is rooted in anxieties around the human social and psychological need for belonging and acceptance.

This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Summary

The Origin of Others begins with a Foreword from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who contextualizes the work in light of the 2016 US presidential election. Coates suggests that the ensuing focus on the plight of white working-class Americans revealed an indifference to the ongoing deaths of Black Americans, especially at the hands of the police. These events, Coates argues, bolster Morrison’s claims and make her arguments about the way racism functions more urgent.

Chapter 1 of the book proper introduces Morrison’s understanding of the process of “Othering,” arguing that it stems from humans’ psychological need to belong, which prompts us to define ourselves in opposition to outgroups. Morrison then examines the casual acceptance and accommodation of slavery and how it happens through scientific racism and romanticization. Chapter 2 looks at the benefits of Othering and the consequences of repudiating those benefits when one belongs to the privileged group, as well as the degrading impact of Othering on those who belong. To explicate her arguments, Morrison examines slave narratives as well as her own personal experiences of “Othering” those around her. She ultimately suggests that what we fear in the Other is an image of ourselves and that this accounts for our often violent attempts to control the Other. Chapter 3 examines white American writers’ use of skin color to drive narrative and reveal character alongside Morrison’s own technique of racial erasure, which reveals Black identity in non-colorist ways.

In Chapter 4, Morrison turns from primarily considering the effects of Othering on those who practice it to considering its effects on those defined as Other. Discussing Black towns and configurations of Blackness, she ultimately demonstrates the fragility and moveability of race as a social construct; her novel Paradise, for example, imagines a Black town in which notions of purity define not whiteness but Blackness. Chapter 5 is a discussion of the Margaret Garner story that inspired Beloved and an explanation of Morrison’s narrative choices. Regardless of the “truth” about Garner and her murdered child, Morrison wanted to use narrative fiction to encourage readers to identify with the child, whom she describes as the ultimate Other. Finally, Morrison uses Chapter 6 to discuss globalization and mass movement and how these reveal the porousness of borders. This porousness prompts anxieties about belonging and consequently can lead dominant groups to attempt to reassert literal and figurative boundaries, continuing the process of Othering. However, novels like Camara Laye’s The Radiance of Children, which places a white European in the position of the Other, can help us to recognize the foreignness within each of us and thus break the cycle of projecting that strangeness onto others.