The We and the They and Our World Today

In this second segment of The We and the They Author Talkback,  my fellow interlocutors and I considered the following question: "How does the story of The We and the They translate into today's social climate?”

When I originally thought to ask this question,  I fundamentally underestimated how much gravitas it would have and how complicated it would be to answer the question within the confines of an hour. Even in the title, The We and the They alludes to group formation and communal identity. When collectives coalesce, they can either be based on togetherness or derived from division. The We come together with the desire to include and share while the They form to exclude and dominate the “fleshed ones” They choose to “other.” No one wants to be othered or excluded, but people are also often reluctant to admit to othering and excluding those who are different from them.  When we think about our collective identities, we like to position ourselves as the We and those who disagree with us as the They. We are more comfortable being the protagonists in our shared narratives. But what if we are more like Tabitha or even the rest of the They than we are willing to confess to ourselves? How do we wrestle with the ways we maintain systems that dehumanize people who are different from us? How do we hold ourselves accountable to upholding unity and diversity and changing the systems to do the same? All of these questions pooled together in our conversation during the talkback, but we all knew that there was so much more to say. No amount of words, pages, or books could ever capture all that needs to be said. But that doesn’t mean we should shy away from discussing it. On the contrary, we can’t afford not to engage with all of these things. Our collective sense of humanity is at stake.