Leslie Scalapino on "Other"

In academic terminology, for example, there is now a category spoken of as "other," the assumption beign that we are not that and and therefore this area cannot be rendered, or even broached except from a distance. As if 'we' are of the world that articulates. The implication even is that if one is "other" - while recipient of sympathy and elucidation, or lipservice - one being outside (as minorities, or lower class, at any rate experientially) has no repute or credibility, cannot speak. The assumption is that language be polemical or disursive exposition as it/one has no (or exposes there being no) intrinsic relation to the subject "other."

This is from Leslie Scalapino's essay "The Cannon", published in the book "The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence."