The True Source of Othering: Reclaiming the We in a World of Me

There’s a common narrative that blames our instinct to “other” on our tribal roots—as if our ancient ancestors, bound together in small groups for survival, could only make sense of the world by drawing lines between “us” and “them.” But that story is a misdirection.

What I’m seeing more clearly now is that it isn’t tribalism that birthed othering.

It’s separation.

It’s the belief that the self stands apart from the whole—that I am not you, that we are not them, that humans are not Earth.

It is this fragmentation—this centering of the individual ego—that creates the illusion of "other."

The irony is that true tribal societies understood something that we, in our hyper-individualized, commodified world, have forgotten:

There is no "other"—only strands of the same great web.

When I stood on Gorée Island, a portal where millions were dehumanized and cast into the abyss of slavery, I didn’t just feel the sorrow of one people. I felt the rupture in the great body of humanity. I felt how far we had drifted from the truth that we belong to each other—not as property, not by hierarchy, but by shared essence.

And it doesn’t end with human beings.

This narrative of separation, of othering, has crept into how we treat the Earth herself.

The rivers have become resources.

The forests, commodities.

Animals, tools or threats.

The air, something to burn.

Even the soil, which once nourished us like a mother’s breast, is now seen as something to conquer, extract from, and own.

The same mindset that drew a line between Black and white, between rich and poor, between citizen and refugee, has drawn a line between human and nature.

But this too, is a lie.

In truth, the Earth is our oldest tribe.

She is not a backdrop to our story.

She is the story.

Every root system is a neural net of belonging.

Every whale song, a sacred chant of community.

Every falling leaf, a gesture of cyclical generosity.

In tribal societies, this was never forgotten.

We knew the stars by name. We sang to the animals we hunted. We asked the water for permission before we drank. We understood that to harm the Earth was to harm ourselves. That to exploit the other was to sever our own spirit.

The system we live in now, the one that has severed us from this truth, thrives on othering. It teaches us to be alone, to climb over each other, to dominate and divide, to forget that we are threads in a single, breathing tapestry.

But this forgetting is not permanent.

And the Earth is always whispering—calling us back to we.

Back to the circle.

Back to reciprocity.

Back to kinship with all that breathes.

We are not here to be separate.

We are not here to be superior.

We are here to remember.

To remember that the ant and the elephant, the coral reef and the child in Gaza, the tree in the Amazon and the grieving mother in Mississippi, the eagle, the snake, the whale, the fungus—all are kin.

And in that remembering, there is no "other."

There is only us.

Let us walk forward as if this is true.

Because it is.

Because it always was.

Because the Earth is watching, waiting, and whispering—

“Come home.”