by JINOY JOSE P.
“I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes…”
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.
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