Walls of the Mind: Anand Pandian on Belonging and Division

Why do everyday Americans feel more divided than ever—despite living side by side?

Anthropologist Anand Pandian joins Faithful Politics to explore the literal and metaphorical walls shaping American life. Drawing from his new book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, Pandian reflects on how gated communities, armored SUVs, and isolated media bubbles reinforce our moral divisions and political tribalism. From border walls to suburban surveillance, the conversation investigates how social infrastructure amplifies fear, reduces neighborly contact, and fosters moral distance.

Pandian doesn’t just critique—he models empathy across difference, even recounting his own experience at a Trump rally. Together with hosts Will and Josh, the episode challenges listeners to reconsider what “safety” really means and how we might rediscover shared belonging.
Whether you're wrestling with polarization, cultural identity, or moral responsibility, this episode offers a hopeful reframe grounded in anthropology, faith, and civic curiosity.

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Guest Bio
Anand Pandian is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down. His work blends ethnography, cultural theory, and storytelling to explore how we live with difference, both globally and within the U.S. He has conducted fieldwork across multiple continents and brings a deeply personal lens to the study of American social divisions.

Something Between Us by Anand Pandian: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781503637870
Anand Pandian's Website: https://anand.studio

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. I'm your political host, Will Wright. It's good to have you back and it's good to have my co-host back, Faithful Host Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? Goodwill, I feel like I haven't seen you in a week, which is probably true. Yeah, I've been doing things. I've been running, running, running things. uh Well, anyways, joining us today is Anand Pandian. He is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Something Between Us, which is a timely and provocative ethnographic journey through the literal and metaphorical walls that divide Americans. We are just so happy to have him with us today. And we're going to really dig into this book because I think that The topic of his book is very, very relevant to at least what we're trying to do here at the show. So welcome to the show, Anon. Thank you so much Will and Josh, it's really such a privilege to be with you folks today. Yeah, it's good to be with you. let's just jump right into it. Like your work explores how we relate to one another across lines of difference. Something that Josh and I have been doing for the past five years, but I'd love to know, like, what drew you kind of specifically kind of to this uh separation that we're seeing between just everyday Americans? Yeah, first of all, I wanna thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate the spirit of what you're doing. I think these kinds of conversations across lines of difference are becoming increasingly rare and they're absolutely necessary. So it's wonderful to know that projects like yours have the kind of momentum that they do and it's great to be in the mix as well. I started this particular journey in 2016. really in the wake of the presidential election that year, which came as a surprise to me as it did to so many people, I would say, in the larger public sphere in the United States and in my circle more particularly. And it was a real eye-opener for me because it was a moment where I realized that my own personal circle, the people that I talk to, the people I engage with, the opinions and viewpoints that I hear on an everyday basis, really do represent a kind of subset and even a bubble that I was living in a kind of bubble myself that I didn't really have a good read on the country as a whole. And I wanted a better understanding of that. And as an anthropologist, I do this for a living. I try to make sense of how people live, what makes them tick, why they do the things they do, why they have the kind of commitments they have. I've done a lot of that research outside the United States and... I was born and raised in this country and I hadn't done much of that work here myself. And so I decided I had to turn that anthropological eye back to the country where I was born, raised, and where I live to try to make sense of things, how we got to that moment, what it all means, where we're going. I really love that. You know, as an anthropologist, how do you separate your own views, your own sense of right and wrong, your own sense of taboo? Like, how do you kind of separate yourself to be able to look at a population objectively? I imagine that could be pretty hard, especially if there's things... that you see that feel kind of viscerally wrong to you. How do you work through that? It's a great question and it's one of the central professional challenges, I suppose, that we have in a field like ours. And it's a challenge that was very much in, it was very much front and center with a project like this one, precisely because it was things that were happening that were said that year that I found disturbing, have to be honest, that led me to take on this particular project. I am the child of immigrants. to the United States. My parents came here in the 1970s when the United States was in desperate need of medical expertise and folks like my father were able to help meet that need that this country had. And it's really important. We grew up in, my brother and sister and I grew up in a community of Indian Americans in Southern California. And we always took for granted the idea that we have an important place in this country that we're part of this larger project. of building a society across these different racial, cultural, ethnic, social lines. And yet that year, I, like so many other people, began to feel a sense of unease around whether we in fact have that place in this country, whether there is room for people of other backgrounds, other faiths, other beliefs in the larger national discourse, the society we have here. And in particular, it was the notion of the border wall. that led me to take on this particular project. That slogan, build the wall, that people were chanting with such enthusiasm by the thousands in arena and arena, arena after arena around the country. I wanted to understand that better. I wanted to understand why it is that something that might feel incredibly cruel and indifferent to the suffering that often leads people to come in. the desperation that leads people to come into a country like this without papers, without authorization. How can you turn a blind eye to that kind of suffering? Where does that come from? That willingness to meet those needs, not only with indifference, but sometimes even with a kind of gleeful rejection. And so that's what prompted me to do this, but you're absolutely right that in doing this in good faith, in doing this in a spirit that was adequate to the complexity of our social life in this country. I couldn't just lead with those judgments. I couldn't wander around the country scolding people or lecturing people ah or trying to convince them that they were wrong and I was right. I had to meet them with an open mind. I had to try to figure out why they have the commitments they do, why the ideas that they have, the beliefs they have, the things that they take for granted. may be so different from the things I take for granted. And this book is really the result of that journey. I really appreciate that answer. Did you have to do like a lot of self-talk like internally? Like, all right, calm down, know, Anand, don't, you know, you gotta, I guess I'm curious, like how did you kind of get from that amygdala fight or flight to trying to work through it? it's hard. It's hard to begin with when you disagree with people. It's even harder when that disagreement begins to take on a kind of existential quality where the very question of whether you can live side by side in peace comes into focus when there's sometimes so much hostility in the air that can definitely activate that fight or flight impulse. Let's be honest, it's been a really difficult time these last years for people in more marginal social situations, for people in more precarious situations, for people uh who are minorities, honestly, like me. And I felt this sometimes really acutely in doing this research. The book grows out of research I did in more than a dozen states around the country over these last years. One of the very first things I did, getting back to your specific question, was to attend a Trump victory rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania in November, in late November of 2016. It was a very white crowd. was one of the few visible minorities. I was one of the few visible minorities in the crowd. Felt pretty uneasy. There was a lot of xenophobic rhetoric coming from that stage. And yeah, there were things that happened even at that rally that made me feel a little uncomfortable, I have to say. On the other hand, the interesting thing is that on a much more sort of mundane scale, at the scale of say, myself and the people sitting around me when I found my way very nervously to one row that had a seat open and asked for permission to sit and I sat down, the folks on that row were really friendly. They offered to share their popcorn. One of them offered uh an extra sign that they had for the incoming president-elect. I took it and held it with some chagrin. I was negotiating some of this. I was negotiating some of this. But we had things in common, and that was the odd thing. One of them worked at a university not far from the side of that rally. There were things that we could talk about. another one worked at a pretzel company. And it so happened that I had sent my kids to school with pretzels from that company that morning. There were things to talk about. And yet at the same time, there was this mismatch between that kind of everyday friendliness that we know so well and the hostility that was coming from the stage that people were also participating in. Right? Because people were chanting along. So there's a kind of contradiction there that I wanted to understand and I try to work out in this book. You know, I'm curious, just for those that aren't familiar with the field of anthropology, if you can just quickly talk about what is the field of anthropology and then kind of the second question, like what is the thing between us that your book alludes to? Yeah, absolutely. So anthropology is the study of human experience, human culture, human society, how it is that our lives are organized socially, collectively, what are the habits and customs and rituals and convictions that organize one society as opposed to another that explain the difference between our different human societies in different parts of the world, really paying attention to the ways in which social life is organized in a particular place, trying to understand the minutia of everyday life that gives people a place in that society and making sense of the larger ideas that people believe in and hold forth as their own, as members of that place. Historically, that is a kind of work that anthropologists have done. in other countries around the world, often in colonized countries as a way of making sense for colonial powers of these places that Western countries have decided to take control of. So it's a pretty insidious operation in some ways for many years. But there's been a lot of criticism of that. And anthropologists, would say now, are much more tuned to some of these political dynamics that we've already started to talk about. And a lot of us are doing this work now in Western contexts, in our own societies. here in the United States, in North America, in Europe, and really trying to make sense of the complexity of this modern experience that we all share. Because at the largest level, it might seem like we have a lot in common, our countries and sort of nationalist visions are often really committed to the idea of celebrating that unity and what we have in common. But clearly, so many of our societies are composed of deeply different people with deeply different backgrounds. and deeply different convictions. mean, in a way, that's what your podcast grows out of, from what I understand at some level. So I think in a situation like that, with the kind of training that we have in paying attention to those differences, we can try to understand why they're as meaningful as they are and what kinds of impacts they have. The title of the book, Something Between Us, comes from a phrase by James Baldwin. And it's a phrase that grew out of his debate, his famous debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University, in which he describes at one point his experience of being a black man outside the United States and the sort of disdain with which white Americans often met him. even though they were fellow Americans and the sense of difference that they carried and yet he insists there is something between us. They are my countrymen. There is a certain kind of common heritage we share. And that phrase really appealed to me because it gets at the two sides of this particular dilemma that we're caught up in in this country on the one hand, that we do share a lot as members of this country. as people who live and contribute to the well-being of this particular country, but there do seem to be these walls between us. There's something that prevents us from acknowledging, accepting, and running with that commonality. So that's what I'm trying to get at in this book. I love that. So if you could even dig a little bit more, if you could give me like a sense of how would you put the thesis, the main thesis in argument of the book if, and again, it's hard to put it in, you know. in a really summarized form sometimes, I know for me. But what is the main thesis of the book? I hear that there is something between us, but even in more detail, what's your argument in the book, like as your main thesis for our audience? It's great. The subtitle of the book is The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down. essentially what happened in my researching the book is, as I said earlier, I began to think about the border wall and the appeal of the border wall in particular and the appeal of this idea of building an impenetrable barrier between the United States and Mexico or southern neighbors. as a strategy to deal with the immigration crisis. I thinking about that, trying to make sense of that as I was saying earlier, but what I came to understand, what I try to argue in the book is that ideas like that appeal to many people because they resonate with the everyday walls and boundaries and divides of their daily lives. That the wall isn't simply a kind of abstraction or a metaphor or a symbol. fantasy. It's not just something that's out there that you can just conjure up in your mind. Ideas like that have the force they do because they echo the everyday divides that people live with on a daily basis. What do I mean by that? There are four kinds of divides that I talk about in the book. I talk about the walls of the home and the ways in which our homes have become increasingly fortress-like. in their character with the rise of gated communities, with the rise of surveillance and security technologies of various kinds, developments that have made the simple gesture of being neighborly with others, especially with strangers on an everyday basis, a harder and harder proposition. I talk about the transformations in our roadway culture in the United States, the ways in which vehicles have gotten ever larger, vehicles that we move around in the world in, cars, Sorry SUVs and trucks that now completely dominate the automotive market that look and feel like Armored vehicles and that once again make it harder to connect with those on the outside I talk about the ways in which our body cultures in the United States again So often seem to lean into this idea that we can armor ourselves from the dangers outside Why is it that we have? Why is it that we have sports drinks called body armor, for example? Why is it that we have uh sort of protein powders called body fortress? Like where does all that imagery come from? Why are we thinking of our bodies again in such individualistic terms? I also talk about what I call walls of the mind. The ways in which our social media, our information ecosystems, where we get ideas, are also increasingly walled off from ideas that are unfamiliar to us, ideas that don't sit as well with our own presuppositions, our own ideas about the world, our own sense of what is real and unreal, and cocoon us once again within these spaces where we are likely to be much more in the company of familiar ideas and familiar perspectives rather than exposed to the unfamiliar. The argument essentially then that I'm making is that all of these different ways of distinguishing the familiar and the unfamiliar, what is like me and what is unlike me, what is mine and what belongs to others, all of those divides in a sense build on each other, magnify each uh other and make it all the more difficult to really feel the underlying and in fact real commonality that we have. with others. share a planet, we share a country, we share a continent, we share neighborhoods. There are so many spaces at so many scales that we do share of necessity because we are social beings and yet all of our infrastructure is conspiring to rob us of an adequate awareness of that common reality. I'm curious how much um the things that separate us is less about the body armor, the religion, the whatever, the differences that are present, um and how much of it is really just regrouping ourselves by our own... oh morality or our own moral foundations, if you will, to use a Jonathan Haidt term. uh Everybody kind of has these pillars that we set up, and then we find other people that have a similar set of pillars. And then if a person somehow or another doesn't uphold one of the pillars that we have in our group, they become ostracized, and then they go find another group that has the pillar that they share. like, I'd love for you just to kind of talk about that, like, you how much is it, you know, we all just believe in so many different things and have things that are so rooted and grounded in our foundation, our moral foundation that, you know, it just makes it harder to really communicate with with anybody else. Yeah, so there's been a lot of talk lately about tribalism, say political tribalism, the idea that somehow we've just kind of hived off with our own kind. And that in that sense, maybe it feels really ancestral and archaic. Like maybe what we're doing now is just what humans do. Maybe, like there's this notion, I think, that you see a lot in popular culture, this notion that... um that there may be just something really basically human about just sort of wanting to be with your own kind. But again, the reality, speaking as an anthropologist, is that social life is actually much more complicated. It has long been much more complicated. I'll take an example from another place for a moment and then come back to your question if I can. So my family's from India. I've done a lot of my research as an anthropologist in India. And one thing that you learn when you pay attention to the culture and history of that country is that different religions have coexisted side by side in that country for for centuries, literally millennia. Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity, right? You have communities of people of different faiths living side by side for centuries. You have people of one faith going to temples and places of worship. of another faith because they find things of that other faith available in those places that they don't find their own and yet they hang on to that identity. This has been true forever in India and yet it's getting more complicated with the rise of religious nationalism and the rise of a more exclusive way of thinking about India now as a Hindu country which is making all of these interfaith relationships much more complicated and difficult than they have been for centuries past, right? which is to say that a development like that is a recent development. It's not a sort of time immemorial uh reality. And I think what I'm trying to say in this country as well is that we're seeing something similar. It's not just that we don't know naturally how to be with others who are unlike us, because in truth, we've had to be with others who are unlike us forever and ever in all kinds of ways, but... These dimensions of our more isolated and segregated daily life that I've been talking about make that more difficult. They make it harder than it's been before. And I think that a lot of these ideas, the more charged ideas that we have about whether or not we can actually be in the company of others we disagree with have a lot to do with the extent to which we put ourselves in spaces where, I don't know, we're not really encountering. those other ideas, those other people. We're not really facing up to the reality of those differences. We're not taking seriously the possibility that we can actually interact across those lines. I've seen that again and again in this book in different ways. Yeah, I was just going to ask just a quick follow-up because I read this thing a couple years ago, and I'm probably going to misrepresent where the study came from, but I think it was Northwestern. They did a whole study about um In-group, Out-group dynamics, and uh they're using the example of um Israel and Palestine, and the study took place. many, many decades ago. out of the study, they landed on a term, uh motive attribution asymmetry, basically showing how Republicans and Democrats in America are just as divided as uh Israelis and Palestine. And uh I'd love just to get your thoughts, just to make sure I'm thinking about this the right way. oh Which of your book, you know, really kind of addressing this in-group out-group dynamic or the thing that's in between the in-group out-group. Well, it's both, right? Because I, on the one hand, I want to try to make sense of why it is that these in-group, out-group dynamics, to use that language, have the force they do right now. But on the other hand, I do sincerely believe that we have the ways of getting beyond them. And some of the stories I tell in the book are about that, exactly, about coalitions that are built across lines of difference, about relationships that are forged. across lines of difference, about ways of rekindling those connections and building a different kind of social possibility. Right? So that's a lot of what I'm interested in. But yeah, to do that, we have to confront the divisions. To give one example that relates to the question that you asked, one of the chapters follows the course of a friendship I rekindled with a friend I grew up with in Southern California who wound up leaning conservative. who grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, listening to conservative talk radio, while I grew up with a really strong sense of a kind of leftist politics. And it wasn't the political divide as such that led us to stop talking, but it was one of the dimensions of the fact that for many, many years, we didn't really say much to each other. He reached out to me again in the fall of 2016, And uh I think he friended me on Facebook, said something like, don't laugh at my politics, LOL. This was a time when people were unfriending each other on Facebook because they had voted differently. This was happening a lot. But we went in the opposite direction. I had a few months in, I had a sabbatical in early 2017. My wife and I and our kids, we spent a few months in Los Angeles and this friend of mine and I started hanging out again. And we got into lot of conversations actually about our political differences and trying to make sense of why it is that it was so difficult to agree on things. One of the things that we realized is that because of the media that he tuned into, the media I tuned into, uh the most basic sense that we had of what was real in the world was profoundly different. And it wasn't just that, it was also the case that in these bubbles that we lived in, think people were conjuring up ideas about the very impossibility of even having such a relationship. People were talking in in talk radio, in the kind of talk radio that he was listening to, that I began listening to as well in those years, about a kind of civil war that was brewing in this country. The idea that these divides had gone so deep that we couldn't even to each other. He took me to oh the meeting of a uh leading Republican PAC called the Lincoln Club in Southern California, which was actually a really interesting experience. And there was a whole discourse around this, around oh the impossibility of actually even living side by side with each other because of these political differences. I think that it is true that given the like the seriousness of these differences, given the implications they have for, I don't know, just our ability to acknowledge each other as human beings. Like these questions are real, they're serious. They're not meant to be taken lightly, but unless we can figure out ways of living more effectively with each other, there's no way we can actually Ultimately, would say learn how to talk Effectively to each other as well like I what I'm trying to argue in the book is that there's a certain kind of relationship between that uh the sphere of our beliefs and our ideologies and our convictions on the one on the one hand and just the Everyday circumstances of our lives on the other to make it much more concrete I know I've been talking a bit but one of the arguments that I make in that book is That it isn't simply the case that people listen to ideologically polarized media like talk radio. They do it in private automobiles where there are spaces that they're in alone so often. And if you're in a space like that, listening to an isolating discourse, coming in and out of a house that is built to take you in and out of that house through the garage rather than your front door, such that you're not really interacting with anyone. whose ideas may be different than the ones that you're taking in, maybe you got your headphones on, like all this stuff, right? It all feeds on itself and just makes that everyday exposure to difference that much harder to... to experience and also to take seriously as a necessity. I really appreciate that explanation. you know, I'd to get a little context for my next question. I've been watching Avatar The Last Airbender with my kids and they love it. I mean, they want to keep watching it. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's the Nickelodeon show and it's so, it follows the Avatar. I think we watched a movie version, maybe. Well, yeah, so the cartoon show came out in Nickelodeon, I guess in like the 2000s. Really, actually, it's it's really good, but we're at this part where they go to the Earth Kingdom again. People can air bend, meaning they can control air, control earth, control blood, whatever. Right? So the avatar is supposed to be able to do all this. And so they're going to the earth kingdom and there's a city called Ba Sing Se, which means impenetrable city in Chinese. And they're there and not only in the city has two massive walls that go like up to the clouds. And then, but within the city, there's also like secret, like cultural police. that are always trying to get people to not think about the war that's going outside, not worry about things, keep cultural uniformity. And so they trap people and they don't let them or they arrest them. And then they brainwash them if they start talking about things that are different than what they want or not approved. And it got me thinking like in this conversation about the two walls there, right? The physical walls, but then the sociological. walls and the construction of physical material and then the construction of what like relational material social material i don't really know what to call it and that's kind of what i wanted to ask you about like what do we call these things like when we call them barriers and you know when i look at a wall it's very it's very easy to see So for instance, I live in the suburbs of Richmond and we're like 20 minutes from downtown and um it's very like, it's a peaceful place, right? And actually we don't, we don't really like, I don't think we would tolerate a lot of disturbance, right? There'd be a massive like probably police response. Actually I've seen it. I had to make one little call. because there's something happening. was a small thing. And I swear to you, six police showed up to my house in the suburbs because something was going on with my neighbors. Essentially, someone was like overdosing on drugs. But anyway, which again was a weird, like we did not want to see that. So we call the police. And I'm just thinking like, what is it those kinds of actions that create walls? What creates? the kind of walls socially. I know we've been talking about it, but I'd love to get a little more maybe specific on it from your anthropological perspective. Why is it so powerful? These cultural things, why do they create walls in our minds? It's a super important question and I think maybe one of the, well, the way I'd like to approach it is just to zero in on a word that you used, the word disturbance. What is it that makes a disturbance? What is it that makes something disturbing? For something to be disturbing, there has to be a picture of the order that gets disturbed. There has to be a picture of the piece. that gets disturbed. And at a certain level, the contention I'm making in this book is that the more isolated and separated and segregated our circumstances are, the lower the threshold for what counts as a disturbance, the lower the threshold for what feels disturbing. What I'm saying in a sense is that the less contact we have with people who are unlike us, with ideas that are foreign to us, with people that are unknown to us, the more disturbing those encounters may be. To make it really tangible and to bring it home to the space of the street. One of the basic arguments that I make in the book with regard to our domestic lives in this country has to do with the everyday sociality of our neighborhoods. There's a chapter on suburbanization and its consequences for the texture of our social lives that's based primarily in Fargo, North Dakota, where I did some of this research. And I'm talking to realtors. I'm talking to real estate developers. And one of the dynamics that we're talking about is something that people describe there, but also people describe to me in many places around the country, which is that people who used to hang out on their front porches are now hanging out increasingly on their back decks. People who used to hang out both outside of the house, right? But people used to hang out on an outside of the house that was open to the street, that was open to people passing by, people walking by, or increasingly doing it in the company of others that they know. People who are invited to interact with them and know others. I live on a street in Baltimore. I live in a townhouse, as I was saying earlier. We live in the city. We live side by side with many other people. Our walls are shared, like our walls are our neighbors' walls. We've got people walking up and down the street all day, walking their dogs, just walking. We've got people, I don't know, we've got all kinds of people, right? And we interact with strangers on a daily basis. We have a front porch culture in this country. It means that on a day-to-day basis, we interact with strangers. Maybe sometimes in really small ways, it might just be a nod, it might just be, you know, just a wave of the hand or whatever, but we're doing that in a very habitual way in a neighborhood like mine, but in a way that is increasingly uncommon, I would say, in many parts of this country. And that has consequences, because the less you interact with people who you don't know, I would say, the more potentially it can, the more disturbing it can potentially feel. to see those people, you begin to have those suspicions, those questions. What are they doing here? What are they really about? And I don't know, let's just think about the door for a moment. The fact that the simple act of knocking on a door has become much more fraud. It always fraud maybe for people of color in this country, but even more so now with the rise of video doorbells, people in a sense sort of Looking on a phone to see whether or not they should open the door at all to someone These kinds of things designed to protect us once again rise up as another layer between us and others and all of these things I say Lead us they dispose us to to to feel more easily disturbed at the the manifestation of unexpected things unexpected ideas, unexpected presences. A lot of this stuff exists to make us safe and to make us secure, but it can also leave us perennially on edge, perennially anxious. And I think that that has a lot to do with this really anxious and xenophobic and frankly hostile politics we've landed in in this country. You know, I'm curious as a black man Black people, and I'm speaking very generally here, have this thing whenever we pass each other, we do this head nod thing, kind of like we acknowledge each other. I just got back from Kansas recently and walked to the airport. I don't know how many times I did that. People of all different shapes and sizes. And I remember having a white friend of mine asking, why is it that you guys can do that? I'm like, I don't know. It was never taught to me. another black person do it, like, hey, that's a thing, you know, like, but then it sort of like builds this community, this sort of unspoken community of folks. And I say that just because I'm curious about, you know, this, uh you know, the groups and the people that you've spoken to, do you see sort of like this similar type of unity amongst like other demographics? uh And if so, Loughrey, just kind of, you know, unpack that a little. Yeah, it's a great question. I'm so glad that you brought this up. I'll admit to growing up as Indian American, this uh is a phenomenon that I'm familiar with myself. We actually found it kind of funny the way we'd be walking around, say, with our parents and then they'd see another Indian family, right? Maybe uh my mother would see another woman wearing a sari. which she's worn all her life in this country. Or my dad seeing someone who was an uh Indian man and they would not. And we always found it so funny. Why are you acknowledging these people? You don't know them. What are you doing? What are you doing? But there is something really meaningful happening there. And it speaks to... something really important, I think, that you began to gesture at in what you were saying. When you have a society as divided as the United States, when you have a society that has been founded, really founded on racial inequality, a society that's been organized around the logic of racial segregation for so many years, when you have people of other races, especially African American people, the brown people, and of course, Native Americans who've been systematically dispossessed of what they have and denied what they need to make a decent living or to pass something decent along to their descendants and others in their community. Folks who live in conditions of deprivation, in conditions of just structural hardship have no choice. but to lean into those relationships. Because you can't make it on your own. You can't survive on your own. You can't survive without those habits and practices of mutual aid, of collective solidarity, of people looking out for each other because the state isn't looking out for you. Because the larger powers that organize your society are not interested in your wellbeing or adequately interested in your wellbeing. As you probably know from reading the book, one of the chapters focuses on the town of Denton in North Texas. And I'm thinking about in this chapter about what it takes to move toward a more expansive sense of home, a more expansive and inclusive way of understanding home as a shared space of belonging rather than a private residence that I'm just kind of wall myself off from the rest of the world with. And I talk in particular to African-American activists in that town of many generations who've had to organize against the continued aftermath of slavery, of segregation, of Jim Crow, and to find a way of, again, making a living really by engaging in acts of collective caretaking. I talk in that chapter about Quaker Town, prosperous black township that was dismantled. destroyed in the very year that the black Wall Street of Tulsa was firebombed just a hundred miles north of there. I talk about how the black community was displaced to the southeastern fringes of Denton, a place that remains the nucleus of black life in that town today. But I also talk about generations of anti-racist desegregation-focused organizing that people have engaged in. in those uh descendants of that displacement have engaged in in order to make a more effective place for African American members of that community. I talk about the Denton Interracial Women's Fellowship that brought together not only black but also white women together in a spirit of desegregating the schools, the restaurants, the movie theaters, the public spaces. of that community, again, by building relationships and leaning into those relationships. I talk about more recent uh organizing in the name of Black Lives Mattering that have again built on those earlier legacies, but once again, with an eye to building those relationships. I think that there's a lot to learn from that still. I think that the reality is that on a planet of such deep... interdependence where the actions that we take in one place can have so many unforeseen consequences in so many other places, we have to be able to take those interrelationships seriously. And I think that there's a lot to learn from folks who have made that kind of attention to the importance of those relationships often, as you say, with strangers, the foundation of a different way of being in the I really, I really appreciate that. I'm, you know, I was thinking as you were talking, the idea that the polarization that we're experiencing is engineered, but not inevitable. And I, I guess I want to just kind of dig into the idea of like how engineered, I mean, I know that it's. So I know that it's engineered in the sense that there's human intention behind it, like someone. you know, like there's a trend maybe and like there's maybe let's say there's a there's a company and they want to build a you know, a neighborhood for millionaires. And so what are they going to do? They're going to make it secure. They're going to maybe put up gated, right? All that stuff that would go into this. have no idea. I've never designed a, you know, neighborhood for millionaires, but like, but I have heard of even neighborhoods that you won't even find on Google Maps or anything because I I don't know how they get you to take their, how they get Google to take their house off Google Maps. I can't figure that out. But apparently, if you have enough money, you can. like, em when we're thinking, I'm thinking about like someone coming in and engineering this. So there's deliberate, right, engineering there. There's intentionality. They're thinking about the consumer that's gonna come and do this. Maybe they're thinking about the color of their skin. Maybe they're not. Maybe there's assumptions about it. How much, what degree do you think this is ultimately engineered? Like I guess, and I'm trying to say, is there a really nefarious, intentional little group of people trying to create these issues that you found? Or do you think this is like, this is how societies go? um in general and they start to fragment and segment each other. I guess, does the question make sense? I feel like I'm not really bringing it out right. To what degree is it engineered, I guess? no, makes a ton of sense to me. And I think that the reality is that... There are things that happen all the time that aren't necessarily intended to happen that way, but wind up happening and happening really powerfully and forcefully. Like you start out just wanting to make money. You learn that one way to do that is to address people's fears and anxieties. You design something that is marketed as a way of responding to some kind of fear and anxiety. You learn that in marketing it, you can actually boost the demand if you... give a little fearful messaging. So maybe you instill a little fear. Maybe you do that, maybe you do that, and it helps, right? But then that fear takes on a life of its own. As people start to live that way, as people start to take that for granted, as everyone starts to imagine, how could I possibly live without, say, this security device or that device or that device? How could I live in a, um you know, in a... How could I drive a small car when everyone else on the street is driving such a giant car? Right that those things that weren't necessarily designed To to move all of us in that direction wind up having that effect I think that that's kind of what's happening in this country right to make it really tangible and to shift the focus dip slightly away from just the home as such which we've been talking about Let's just talk about the automobile for a moment. uh We have a Honda Fit. It's a small car. It's a compact car. It makes a lot of sense in terms of urban living. It's a breeze to park, to parallel park. It fits into all kinds of places that you wouldn't imagine a car could fit into. It's a very popular car all around the world, but it's a car that Honda discontinued a few years ago in the United States because the market for it had totally bottomed out. The market in fact for smaller cars is bottoming out in all kinds of ways. Manufacturing plants that were making smaller cars are getting retooled again and again to make bigger cars because that's where the market is going in the United States. Everyone wants a bigger car. People feel increasingly that to move through the world securely in an automobile means move. moving through the world in a bigger car. That has consequences of all kinds. It makes things much more dangerous for those of us who still drive smaller cars. It makes things more dangerous for pedestrians and for cyclists because these larger cars have more mass. They sometimes have compromised visibility. They're more rigid. They have higher hoods. There are all kinds of things about them that can make it more difficult and more dangerous. But As that market accelerates and takes up more prominence, as those commitments become more widespread, a lot of people may come to feel, and I even write about this in the book, like my own personal dilemma, when this car, like when we have to sell this car or give it up and get a new car, will we also have to buy a bigger car? Because there's really no choice at this point. My son is learning how to drive. He's got a learner's permit. If he starts to drive a vehicle of his own on roadways dominated by these massive vehicles, would I feel comfortable letting him drive a smaller car? These are dilemmas I think that all of us face that have to do with the unintended consequences of things that are set into motion. Society can move in a direction where everything in the aggregate tends to go a certain way even if the point wasn't for all of it to go that way in some nefarious manner. There are emergent outcomes, I guess that's one way, the emergent or unanticipated outcomes of incremental decisions. um That's how I say it. But on the other hand, you also have people, as I also talk about in the book, if we just stay with this automotive question for a moment, you have people organizing for safe streets, for complete streets, for more sidewalks, for bike lanes, for... road diets for ways of slowing down cars, for ways of making our roadways once again safer for more vulnerable roadway users. I write about some of this in the book. And I think that once again with this as with everything else, if we pay attention to these infrastructural dimensions, if we pay attention to the consequences they can have, it might lead us to... be more sympathetic to those activists and organizers and planners that are trying to get us to change some of these habits. It might give more support to the effort to make our collective life more livable instead of just always securing our individual lives at the expense of that collective wellbeing. That for me is where the hope in this book lies. Is there an argument to be made from the perspective of the big truck driver in the sense of, I agree that people buy big vehicles for a number of different reasons. Manufacturers will create them to accommodate them. But when I first got married and we started having kids, I remember having a discussion with my wife who was raised in Mennonite, by the way. uh And that's important because she's very pacifist. And I talked about getting a large truck for safety reasons. I'm like, hey, you know, like if we're on the road, like I don't want to be the smallest car in the road with with children. You know, like I'm a fairly safe driver. don't plan on hitting anybody. But if we were to get hit like this is the vehicle I'd want to be in, you know, and I venture to guess I'm probably not alone in thinking that way and a lot of, you know, probably big. vehicle drivers in the road. mean, I remember growing up, like that's the reason everybody wanted to own a Cadillac, right? Like those things are built like tanks. They're like, you know, 20 feet long, you know, and, they just kind of look cool. So like, is there an argument to kind of argue the other side of, you know, like manufacturers should be building these things because people want to feel safe. Look, safety is important. Security is important. We all deserve the chance to make our way through the world in a state of well-being. We owe that to our families. We want that for our kin. We want that for everyone we care about. The challenge though is that when those commitments to safety and security are pursued in a manner that secures some at the expense of others, that protects those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, that can make people on the inside safer in some ways while simultaneously making people on the outside more exposed. You can think of that in terms of the shell of these vehicles. You can think of that in terms of climate change and carbon emissions. You can think of that in all kinds of ways, right? It's hot, it's a really hot day today in Baltimore. I'm grateful that we have air conditioning, but the reality is that the more we do this, the more we're heating up the world outside by cooling our insides. There are all these contradictions at work, I argue, that are founded on this way that we've become accustomed to protecting the interior worlds that we take most seriously. at the expense of well-being on the outside. There's all kinds of suffering. have real difficulty acknowledging and tuning into right now. You mentioned Palestine, where there are people starving, there are children starving. Why is it so hard to take that seriously? Right? So what I'm trying to, and of course our faith leaders do take that seriously, right? And our faith leaders, I you guys are called Faithful Politics and so you know this. This is a core bedrock commitment to every religion, right? And yet it seems so difficult. So what I'm trying to say is that these things, let's call it cruelty even, right? The kind of unintentional cruelty that comes with the way that our lives are organized now, it's there, it's real, it has all kinds of consequences, but it isn't enough to just blame people for it. It isn't enough to say, you you're a bad person, which is why we have all these bad things happening. It's too easy to just blame people of bad character. Oh, you you've got the wrong convictions. That's why we're in this predicament. What I'm trying to say is that this cruelty, this indifference, this systematized suffering is actually baked into a lot of these habits and infrastructures that we've come to take for granted. If we really want a less merciless world, which frankly we need, we're going to have to pay attention to some of those habits, right? Is the only way to secure your family joining that race for the ever larger vehicle? Could we instead have wider sidewalks? Could we have better marked routes to get to school? Could we have safe and affordable public transportation that would meet those needs? Could we make it possible for people to get where they need to go on foot or in non-automotive conveyances? There are all kinds of questions we can ask. Why are we locked into that one way of doing things? That's the question. And I think the answer really lies in, lies with those that tell their stories in this book as well. Those who are trying to remind us that there are actually other ways of organizing our streets, other ways of organizing. our neighborhoods, other ways of thinking about our well-being, our bodily well-being even, in collective terms rather than individual terms, is an argument I make in the company of clean water activists, right? Other ways of doing politics that rely on coalitions between people on the left and the right. We can still do all that. People still are doing all that, which is what leaves me hopeful ultimately with a book like this. But you can only take all that so far if you're saddled with all of this isolating infrastructure. My last question for you is, so your book is titled after James Baldwin, which surprisingly, a lot of authors we talk to have titles that are named after James Baldwin, which is great, I think. He does, yeah, did. probably read James Baldwin at some point, Will. I know, we really should. ah But like, if James Baldwin were still alive and he read your book ah and was asked to write a review about it, what would you hope that James Baldwin say about your book? I don't know. I don't know. because I have to admit to you that I didn't write this book as an expert about the United States. I didn't write this book because I felt that there were things that I understood really deeply about American life and I wanted to make sure that other people understood them too. I didn't write this book because you know, I, I, I, because I had some kind of, I believe that I had some kind of unique insight that no one else had and I want to just kind of throw it in the mix with utter confidence. I wrote it because I was confused. I wrote it because I was worried. I wrote it because I was concerned about the future of the country, about future of families like ours about the the futures foreclosed for all kinds of other people inside this country outside this country who are suffering on account of choices that have been made more recently I wanted to try to understand how we got here and what it would take to go somewhere else I don't know I don't know how much value the exercise has I don't know I'm not I'm not I'd like to think that the effort of a book like this can help us think through some of these challenges and move maybe in a different direction and in doing that I try to learn from people like Baldwin I try to learn from people who've been paying attention to these kinds of things for a really long time as writers, as activists, as poets, as architects, as planners Right? People who've devoted their lives to making sense of these things in a robust and adequate manner. I rely on their words. I rely on their stories. I rely on their experiences. I try to do justice to that vision. Whether I have, whether I've had enough of it, I don't know myself. I'd like to think that he'd like a book like this, but... I've written it with a kind of humility, honestly, and kind of vulnerability that leaves me not knowing. And I think that's also important. I think part of it too is that we're, I don't know, we're not, there's not enough of that right now. I don't think there's, think we're so worried about saying the wrong thing to the wrong person and what might happen that The risk of being misunderstood is one thing that's actually stopped us from having the kinds of conversations that we need to have. And so I don't know. I don't know how well this book would be understood by an imaginary James Baldwin, really by anyone else, right? But I'm taking the gamble because I felt that I had to do it. I'm giving it a try and we'll see what people say. That's as far as I can go. I love it. um Where can people get the book and kind of follow what you're doing? uh It's very kind question of you. It's available on Amazon. It's available through the Stanford University Press website. It's available through bookshop.org, which is a really nice alternative to Amazon that supports independent bookstores. And so you can get it really anywhere. It's available as a hardback, as an ebook. There's an audio book in the works, I believe, from what I understand. And if people want to find me, I'm a professor at Johns Hopkins. I have a personal website. It's just my first name, .studio, A-N-A-N-D, .studio. That is really, really cool. um, yeah, I just want to thank you for just, know, what you're doing, the book you wrote, um, and just, just being honest, um, I, I can relate to a lot of what you're, saying where we started this podcast five years ago and we're just like, we don't really know what we're doing. Um, and. We try to be honest about that. When we talk to guests, we're like, don't know anything about this particular thing, but you've been talking a lot about it. So unpack that. We just like to ask questions to understand the world. And your book is basically one big question that you're hoping other people can probably ask and get some answers from. So I definitely wish nothing but the best for your work and for the book. And yeah, just thank you for being a part of the show. I love that. I love the idea of just kind of moving through the world with questions and seeing where they take you. It is what resulted in the journey of this book. And the fact that we get to kind of do some of that together in this context with the kind of interfaith, inter-political space that you're creating is really just awesome. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. And to our audience, thank you for stopping by and hanging out with us one more time. was about to say one last time. One more time. And as always, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. And we'll see you next time. Take care.