Fenomenology of racism: philosophical exploration of otherness and exclusion dynamics

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16792184 | PDF 

Educazione Aperta 18/2025

This analysis delves into the phenomenology of racism, viewing it as a complex structure intertwined with deep-seated fears, social dynamics, and philosophical inquiries about otherness and identity. It explores how racism serves as a distorted mirror reflecting our understanding of ‘the Other,’ often projected as the scapegoat for societal insecurities. The discussion extends to the ethical considerations highlighted by philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, who emphasized the ethical responsibility towards the Other. The narrative also scrutinizes the linguistic aspects of racism, showing how hate speech institutionalizes discrimination and how language shapes and sustains these divisive dynamics. Through philosophical and sociological lenses, this exploration seeks to uncover the roots of racism, its manifestation in daily interactions and institutional settings, and the critical role of dialogue in addressing and overcoming these entrenched prejudices.

Keywords: Racism; Otherness; Hate Speech; Ethical Responsibility; Sociolinguistics.

Introduction

In reflecting on the abyss and nuances of racism, we venture into a dark domain where the roots of fear and segregation deeply intertwine with issues of identity, otherness, and coexistence. This phenomenon, which colors and deforms human relations through the centuries, deserves exploration that goes beyond merely denouncing its manifest brutality, delving into its philosophical, cultural, and psychological bases with the seriousness and depth the topic demands. Racism, understood not just as a series of hostile acts but as a complex structure of thought and practice, reveals itself to be a distorting mirror of our understanding of the Other. This entity, the Other, thus becomes the scapegoat upon which to project the insecurities and inadequacies of a society struggling within its own fabric of relations and power. Racism raises fundamentally ontological questions: who is the Other? How does their otherness threaten or enrich my being? And, perhaps most poignantly, how can our shared humanity be recognized and valued in the face of fear and division? Throughout the centuries, philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas (1979) have emphasized the ethics of responsibility towards the Other as a foundation of moral thought. However, racism represents a catastrophic failure of this responsibility, a refusal to recognize the Other as a fully human subject with an inner world as rich and dignified as our own. This refusal is rooted in fertile ground of prejudice, fueled by distorted historical narratives. The discourse on hate, which often accompanies and supports racism, is a phenomenon that must be examined not only for its outward manifestations but also for its origins in the fear of the unknown and the demonization of difference. These dynamics reveal themselves in ways that are as subtle as they are pernicious, infiltrating language, policies, daily interactions, and institutional structures. They outline a landscape where otherness is not an invitation to dialogue or discovery, but a barrier, a wall that divides. Every exploratory inquiry into racism, into its essence, inevitably leads to the denial of genuine dialogue and mutual recognition between the self and the Other. Through the examination of philosophical theories and the scrutiny of social and political practices, the roots of this denial emerge, as well as pathways for a recognition that can truly transform dialogue from a site of conflict to a space of meeting and mutual enrichment.

The Tragedy of Proximity

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos, the existential condition in a hypothetical hell is portrayed through a theatrical version that follows Aristotelian rules of unity of time, place, and action. Through a single act, set in an unchanging scene and limited to three characters, the French philosopher describes an atypical hell, characterized not by eternal fire or torture chambers, but by a well-defined and circumscribed space, namely a closed room, which becomes a symbol of alienation and distrust elevated to a metaphysical dimension. Sartre’s hell is a room that imprisons all the anguish of the cosmos, linked to humanity’s ancestral problem: the problem of the Other, interpreted not as a subject with whom to form an alliance, but as the protagonist of failed interpersonal dynamics and as an expression of an otherness that always presents itself as hostile. The fundamental message of this theatrical work seems to be encapsulated in a fatal dynamic: the inevitable proximity to other people always generates hatred, rejection, resentment, pain. Sartre’s hell is not portrayed as a relentless battle, a spectacular “war of all against all” (Hobbes, 2005) or a manifestation of explicit hatred in the manner of Hobbes’s homo homini lupus, but rather as the raw and silent awareness, as a representation of emotional chill and a muffled scream, which brings the true drama of humanity back to a single point: the real human tragedy is the tragedy of proximity, cohabitation, and the inevitability of mutual contact. Such a hell is defined as a place not of physical struggle, but of constant physical proximity, where one endures the presence, smell, and language of the Other every day, and where the Other becomes the visual and tangible embodiment of a sense of suffocation and ongoing invasion. The plot of the drama is essential and direct: three deceased individuals, who had never met in life, are confined in a hotel room, forced to endure this unbearable contact for eternity. In a minimalist setting, it is human existences that speak to the audience, though deceased in body, they are not so in consciousness and thus can reveal themselves in their true essence, as they could never have done in a world of the living, where social conventions and courtesy mask and hide true feelings. These existences, which would never have “confessed to themselves”, reveal to the audience and the reader what in life represents a deception, a dead end, reflecting the ultimate sense of the human condition according to Sartre (1945): the tragedy of an existence inextricably linked to the chains of a relationship now denied, now postponed, now conflictual. This condition is absurd (characteristic of the theatre of the absurd, to which the work belongs), paradoxical, and scandalous because it is the knot that ties two opposing ends: on the one hand, it is true that as human beings, we can recognize ourselves only through the relationship with the Other, and on the other hand, it is true that the Other becomes unbearable because it remains and will always remain irreducibly different, never completely assimilable or reducible to us. Thus, on one hand, otherness is fundamental, an essential and vital condition for defining identity, the boundaries of our self and our consciousness, and for building the pillar of the norms of civil cohabitation; on the other hand, the Other is labeled as the enemy par excellence, a metaphysical adversary. In this duality, man creates his earthly hell.  “Hell is other people” Sartre decisively states in Huis Clos, and he elaborates on the banality of this statement that is

tasteless as a turnip. There are no physical tortures, understand? Yet, we are in hell. And no one else must come here. No one. Until the end, just the three of us, together... There is no need for an executioner... They opted for a saving on personnel. That’s all... The executioner is each of us for the other two (Sartre, 1945, p. 102, translated by the author).

The Fear of the Stranger

It seems that Sartre has stretched the experience of anguish and fear towards the stranger along the entire arc of human existence, extending it even further, depicting it almost with the same sensations, the same sobs, the same paralyzing terror that every person surely experiences in a physiological manner and limited to a specific moment of their childhood. In developmental psychology, the fear of the stranger is indeed a well-documented phenomenon (Dozza and Loiodice, 1994) and is associated with what is known as the “eighth month anxiety”, a period when the infant’s smile becomes discriminant, when it no longer greets all approaching faces with equal enthusiasm, but only those known, and when in the features of the stranger, it recognizes not only the visible and concrete image of the unknown, but also the evident, yet ungraspable, manifestation of the impossibility of deciphering in the expressions and gestures of the stranger the same communicative language used with attachment figures. The fear of the stranger is the fear of the different, of what is new and manifests itself for the first time: a profound crisis of childhood, a turning point in the construction of identity that intensifies at the eighth month, reaches its peak around two years old, and then gradually tends to regress. In Sartre’s claustrophobic narrative, as well as in the events of our time, it seems, however, that the crisis of the eighth month represents a crisis and a modern drama that is constantly renewed and perpetual, shaping our social interaction with an additional tragic element. Unlike the child, who reacts with harmless crying, the adult responds with hatred to the same fear and anguish, an anguish that tightens the throat and stems from the inevitable, tangible, and non-procrastinable encounter with the Other, with the different, the stranger, the bearer of unfamiliar and unusual linguistic and behavioral codes. In a contemporary world that regresses to childhood in the most derogatory sense of the term, that is, regresses to that emotional immaturity already described by Kant (2017), for example, who theorized the primacy of rationality to emancipate and to understand and transform the world, the fear of the Other becomes the constant and immutable measure on which relationships and alterity are based. It is in this context of regression that the ancestral and primitive angst transforms into xenophobia and manifests itself in various forms. It is now elevated to a true category of thought and of the modern era, and it includes even the fear of man towards the woman especially when the woman expresses her desire for freedom. In these dynamics, hatred weaves its linguistic and paralinguistic narratives, both online and in the physical world, highlighting every day the disturbance of our identities, using an expression by Leonidas Donskis (2008, p. 58) that reminds us how the groups regularly chosen as ideal containers and targets of a hatred that is perennially alive in history and in current events – whether they are blacks, Roma, Muslims, or Jews – are never the real cause of our anxiety, insecurity, uncertainty. They are completely foreign to our personal experience. Indeed, sometimes the absence of negative personal experiences with these groups, the lack of direct, concrete, and demonstrable knowledge, paradoxically intensifies fear and discrimination, precisely because, as Zygmunt Bauman writes (Id. p. 11), a perfectly coherent hatred always adopts the language of groups, of anonymity, and of collective madness. Racism, in short, adopts the language of a homogeneous collective and of an indistinct “us against them” that engulfs and erases the “I-you” relationship, thus destroying that dialogicity which, according to Martin Buber, is at the base of identity, even before relationality. If it is true that ontogenetically the human being constructs the sense of self and its self-definition through the dialogue between the self and the Other (Bellingreri, 2005), and if it is true that without alterity, the self would not have the fundamental tools to develop its own identity, then the aversion towards the Other could be localized and uncovered in an interrupted path, in a dark and sealed room, in a dead-end alley where a dialoguing identity clashes with the wall of a mute relationality, fueling a bipolar dynamic that ultimately engulfs mainly the individual. In the hatred towards the Other, the self drowns and, in such hatred, humanity primarily loses itself and its own identity (Levi, 1947). Examining the language that defines the construction of the enemy, that is, examining the language of a hindered, broken, or corrupted alterity, we can trace all the steps of an equally broken identity: the hermeneutics of the enemy is thus primarily a linguistic hermeneutics, almost philological, of a failed identity construction and of a dialogue with the Other that undergoes an interruption, a suffocation. In declaring its own thought, its own discourse, the self that rejects the Other anticipates its argument with a categorical statement of denial, usually expressed as: “I am not racist, but…”, and what follows often contradicts or explicitly denies this preliminary statement or highlights all its inconsistency, its superficiality. Yet it is precisely in that denial that the desperate attempt to differentiate one’s opinion from the popular one is hidden, and we witness the last breath of the self before it submerges into the collective indistinctness, into that anonymity, into that mass mentality that characterizes hatred towards the different and where the failed dialectic of “us against them” is formed.

Us Against Them

In this linguistic expression unfolds the initial phenomenology of racism and the construction of the enemy, perhaps in its most insidious form: there is indeed a racism that attributes to certain human groups the responsibility of carrying cultural traits incompatible, irreconcilable with the dominant culture, and in this failed fusion with mass culture, a danger to one’s own integrity and a threat to the status quo both at a personal and cultural level is outlined. In the first case, we see symptoms also verbally threatening of a true anxiety of downgrade, made of anxieties, frustrations, envies that lead to considering the Other, even just with its presence, a usurper of rights conceived in purely subjective terms and in terms of a progressive, unstoppable erosion (rights to work, to family, to education that the Other would take away, stealing everything); in the second case, we witness an archaic and primitive expression of the history of ideas and of culture, viewed as a fact immutably established in the past and destined to remain impermeable. Such a perspective considers the world and time as a sealed context, a realm in which power relations and hierarchical structures have already been established, fixed, and regulated, with a space already divided, making the others, who have inevitably arrived too late, bearers of an insurmountable barrier to fusion and destined, despite their efforts, to remain foreign elements to society. The phrase “I am not racist, but...” seeks to absolve the self that takes refuge in the cultural substrate as the sole and main reason for its inability to accept diversity, as if the culture (and not the individual self) were inhospitable terrain for the sprouting of new ideas, therefore intrinsically blameless: “I am not racist because the fault is not mine, but of the surrounding arid and sterile ground”,  the self might continue in its desperate race towards hatred and xenophobia, displaying the logical paradox that if it were alone in the world (just the self and the blacks, or the foreigners, or the refugees) there would be no obstacles in finding the key to access tolerance. The problem, therefore, is completely overturned onto society, onto its secular, immutable nature, onto its harsh and impermeable cultural morphology as if it were a stabilized continent that can no longer be shaken, or an elderly woman now fixed in her rhythms and habits, unable to adapt to the new: at the base of this incompatibility there would be the belief in the absence of a moral unity among peoples (a sort of anti-universalism), the idea that cultures are static and therefore destined to remain irredeemably separate (Faloppa, 2011).

The Issue of Language

On the slippery slope of this collective deresponsibilization that attributes to society every responsibility and that erects a double communicative wall, where the Other is not only different but is foreign with respect to the society that constantly relegates it to a state of dislocation and alienation, language and all its acts become key essential tools to interpret the birth, the maintenance, the strengthening, and the persistence of inequalities and social injustices and to understand that phenomenon that corresponds to the institutionalization of forms of subordination and discrimination elevated to the level of norms and procedures. The phenomenon of the daily and systematic rejection of the Other, the act of a deresponsibilized existence that, according to Hannah Arendt (1951), already finds itself in a dangerous position beyond good and evil and therefore is ready to embrace institutional or legal racism, has a specific linguistic denomination and relies on discursive practices that appear banal or harmless. These include the refusal to use courteous formulas towards an immigrant, opting for a familiar “you” rather than respectful formulas, up to real verbal attacks loaded with insults, the display of symbols associated with recent or past genocides, or the indiscriminate use in the media of expressions loaded with prejudices. In the spread of a flattened language that aims at the annihilation of the self and the Other, at their mortification and their forced insertion into categories that subdivide humanity into generalized groups, the devastating and subtle force of hate speech as a manifestation of the devastating banality of hate itself and of the everydayness of evil is hidden. This, because widespread and pervasive, no longer instills fear and makes the perpetration of every atrocity possible and acceptable. It elevates evil and hate to everyday and familiar dynamics, to practices of “democratic” racism, and so hate speech becomes not only an expression but also the foundation of that spread of racist and xenophobic feelings that are today considered common. Hate speech possesses its standardized clichés, its worn vocabulary, its key words, its coarse and widespread expressions, which have now become common, conveyed both by the media and the online world. This oblique gaze at the Other not only is no longer a subject of fear, but neither of censorship, having become a common place, a metaphorical and privileged position for man and for humanity that meets in online communities, where often subjectivity is lost and suffocated in an indistinct “us.” It is not surprising that on the digital highways, on social and virtual platforms, hate speech is the most widespread and accepted, universally recognized, politically tolerated and endorsed, and is, like Heidegger’s theoretical paths, an interrupted logos that has never developed into a democratic logos. If language is the labyrinth in which and on which man is built (Wittgenstein, 1999) and if from the linguistic register we can deduce the state of man, as if language were a thermometer of the emotional, affective, and relational condition of a community, then even in language we find the terms (in a linguistic and meta-linguistic sense) that allow us to follow and interpret the way of being in the world of contemporary man in all its dynamics, including political ones. If, as Aristotle claims, from being in society man refines his nature as zoon politikon, as a political animal par excellence, through the language of the community it is possible to capture in real time the political dynamics, their evolution or regression. In Plato’s Republic, this concept is reflected when the philosopher seeks a theoretical justification for the transformation, often sudden and dramatic, of democracy into tyranny, a change that is interpreted first of all as a linguistic change and then as a concrete fact, “just when anarchy is called freedom, the squandering of public resources is called generosity, and impudence is called courage”. Moreover, if every form of democratic government combines political action with verbal discourse, being primarily the art of speech and if at the same time, as Gustavo Zagrebelsky states (2009), the words of politics are by nature ambiguous because they are instrumental, as words of power for power, and therefore exposed to every manipulation, then by following the deterioration and crumbling of the meaning of terms and concepts, we can effectively trace the crumbling of political structures and we can perceive the slow slide of democracy (Urbinati, 2006) towards totalitarianism, especially when this language of power is not opposed by the language of the community, the language of the people as an antidote to the dictatorship of the single thought, with its critical vitality of public opinion. It is the language of the people that, according to Maria Zambrano (2000), contains within it the treasure of dignity, a blend of sobriety and richness similar to the music of an organ, because it is endowed with multiple registers. The language of the people is a choral language, but in the sense of being variegated, multiple, multiform, punctual like the chorus in Greek tragedies when it unanimously condemned the tyrant of the moment, simultaneously addressing spectators and sovereigns, or intervening to comment on the events on the scene or to express indignation, thus becoming the prototype of public opinion, which is the true backbone of every democracy since the fifth century B.C. The language of the people, however, remains ineffective or silent or even becomes complicit with power, subordinate to power (which skillfully uses it in a demagogic direction), when the language of the people transforms into the language of the masses and becomes, again according to Zambrano, a language overloaded with adjectives drawn from a very limited repertoire, full of interjections, meager, with a simplified verb. The statements are categorical and pompous, provoke the reaction and at the same time prevent it, because it is a fundamentally aggressive, challenging, dogmatic language. In other terms, it is a logos in contrast with the dia-logos, a logos that creates distances and voids around itself, a repellent and divisive logos that neglects the interlocutor until it erases them, because it uses phrases that crash against a wall, bouncing back like stones. In the schematic language of the masses, the first thing to vanish is time, along with the individual being addressed. Past, present, and future are compressed, solidified. It is a language of absolute yes and no: there are no exits, and therefore no space for dialogue. This is what happens in Sartre’s closed room, where time is suspended in an eternal and uniform continuum and where humanity freezes in dogmatic and non-dialogic positions, demonstrating once again how hatred and evil are not complex or ingenious constructions, not even from a linguistic point of view, but are extremely meager, stripped, banal, poor, insipid “like a turnip” (Sartre, 1945).

Conclusions and educational hypotheses

In Italy, the linguist Tullio De Mauro (2014) has extensively analyzed the close link between linguistic poverty and democratic deficit, highlighting how the new generations, having a less extensive knowledge and control of the meaning of terms compared to past generations, are more exposed to the risk of having their rights usurped. This was the same concern of Don Milani who, in the school of Barbiana, focused his pedagogical approach primarily on language learning, so that the less well-off would not suffer the linguistic overbearance of bureaucracy, legal or political language, and thus would not be constantly oppressed not only by material poverty but also by a poverty of words and thought that blocks every possibility of social, cultural, moral, and economic redemption. A language deficit implies a deficit in democratic awareness and in the ability to handle the téchne, the art of politics, which is not only technique and ability to govern, but is also the ability to observe and judge those who govern and to assess their actions with a moral, ethical, and valorial measure. The Aristotelian political subject is primarily the citizen, not only those called to govern, through the role of representative of others’ instances. And democracy requires careful use of words because every discourse in democracy must be arguable and argued, and it should never present itself with the brute irruption of a club or, worse, of batons, even only verbal. Today, in the new social infrastructures of the Network, in the contemporary virtual agorae, it is evident that the discourses that incite hatred and violence (offenses, oppression against women, conspiracy theories, political insults, persecution of the Other as an enemy) are characterized by a linguistic and argumentative poverty that stems from a theoretical, cognitive, and moral deficiency, precisely because they are discourses tied to stereotypes, to stale slogans, to a lack of critical thinking, to violence due to argumentative incapacity or to anonymity and the irresponsibility that anonymity guarantees. This linguistic desertification, this flattening of every dialogue that is not between members of the same virtual group, of the same tribe or community, this decline in the violent repetitiveness of language, are all conditions that favor the birth and proliferation of antidemocratic, totalitarian, dictatorial modes, thus triggering a political responsibility that is above all a pedagogical responsibility, which is located well before the here and now, well before today and well beyond the immediate, projecting itself into a future perspective with a long time span, both as a recovery of the teaching of history and the past and as an educational hypothesis for the future and not only for the near future. Every phenomenology of hatred and racism, if on one hand it distracts from the construction of the unity of the self, on the other seems essential to build the unity of a group or a nation and appears determinant for the birth of complex contemporary phenomena like the resurgence of racisms or renewed antisemitisms: the work of defining one’s own independent identity, distant from the formless and uncritical mass, that is, far from that Manzonian headless crowd that cried out with one voice “give it to the spreader!”, requires instead courage, intellectual awareness and even heroism, even in opposing common opinion. Every historical era has had its quintessential enemy (Eco, 2012), the culprit or scapegoat on which to blame the faults of humanity and perhaps literature, more than history or the history of political doctrines, has recorded these dynamics, offering a key to the eternal hermeneutics of the enemy when it tells of a salvific reversal of this dynamic and narrates the possibility of escape and the existence of an exit from an ending of violence and hatred. The invitation of Italo Calvino (1991) to “return to the classics” today takes on a pedagogical significance because of the urgency of a remedy to the emotional and cultural desert that the world is going through, because of the need to create opportunities for inculturation or acculturation both at a linguistic level and at a meta-linguistic level in order to thus design a new ideal horizon of coexistence, of proximity, of closeness of man to man. And especially to offer models of relationship in the context of a contemporary and renewed emotional illiteracy allowing to avoid excessive simplification, the reductio to the sole categories friend/enemy that social and virtual dynamics encourage, showing the complexity of the world and at the same time revealing the beauty of this complexity: returning to the classics, writes Calvino with pedagogical wisdom, means listening and thinking. Literature can teach that the only key to access complexity coincides with the ability to understand the Other without denying it: literary fiction allows achieving this awareness because it offers a model of ethically possible life. Already in Aeschylus, for example, at the dawn of Greek democratic civilization that has marked the entire West, we read the tragedy of the Persians, the quintessential enemies of the Athenians. The playwright pushes readers and spectators, with a very profound plastic and scenographic movement, to cross the rooms of the stranger, to live with him even just for the time of a theatrical act, to listen to his words, to wear his costumes and his religiosity, thus teaching a exquisitely secular brotherhood, all focused on the earth and established on the rule of common mortality and common feeling that as humans inevitably unites us. That was enough (and indeed that was enough for the Athenians facing the first performance of The Persians by Aeschylus) to cry scandal: yet, as Massimo Cacciari (2001) writes, precisely the door of scandal, of the unheard, of the unspeakable, is the door, still today open, the narrow but penetrable gap towards the understanding of the human and the divine, or perhaps, also, but it is only a hypothesis, of the divine in the human.

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L’autrice

Angela Arsena is Associate Professor of General Pedagogy at Pegaso University. She was previously a researcher at the University of Genoa. After earning her PhD at the Pontifical Athenaeum Antonianum in Rome, where she defended a dissertation in epistemology (supervised by Prof. Dario Antiseri), she held a research fellowship in Innovative and Inclusive Teaching Methodologies at the University of Foggia. She has also taught at Abu Dhabi University. Her research focuses on digital hermeneutics, teacher professional development, educational relationality through social media, and media pedagogy, advocating a return to the classics as a way to interpret and navigate contemporary challenges. She has published with Rubbettino: Dal villaggio globale alla polis globale (2018); Insegnare filosofia online. Questioni di ermeneutica pedagogica (2019); Figure educative del mito. Quando il gesto narrativo antico insegna la contemporaneità (2020); Il valore dell’ipotesi nella metodologia sperimentale (2022-Premio Siped 2023); Verso la polis digitale (2023).