Louise is Elizabeth blog

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BOOK: Morrison, Toni, The Origin of Others, Harvard University Press, 2017. This interesting content is from a series of lectures Ms. Morrison presented at Harvard as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series. It looks at racism in the context of the broader social phenomena she calls "othering," the tendency of humans to define themselves by defining who is other than them. The introduction by Ta-Nehisi Coats places it in history not only of racism in America but also among other writers on the subject. This is a short work that triggers and requires thought, so I read and reread chapters as I went along. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in how we identify with and separate ourselves from others, especially but not exclusively in the form of racism.