The residential community was lodged near a national forest on the outskirts of Scottsdale,Arizona. Forbidding gates and sentry posts restricted access to the exclusive development and its elegant homes. But security here went much further.
Each cul-de-sac in the colony had its own individual railway gate, and many of the homeowners had installed gates across their own driveways as well. Anyone coming in or out of those houses would have to clear three checkpoints that set them apart from the wider world beyond.
I was astonished. But the security director at the gated community saw nothing unusual in such arrangements. “People shouldn’t be able to just walk into where you live. You should be able to defend yourself against the rest of the world.” Immigration officers were doing exactly the same thing along the country’s border, he added: defending us.
I couldn’t help but think about what I had seen in the company of migrant aid volunteers earlier that week in southern Arizona, all the tattered clothes and humble belongings caught in the brush of a desert trail, attesting to the desperation of those who had fled through that harsh terrain.
How could people be indifferent to such suffering, I asked one of the volunteers. “It’s like talking to a wall,” he replied.
Over the last eight years, I have crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, trying to make sense of why the rifts in our national culture run so deep. I have talked with homebuilders in North Dakota and activists for housing justice in north Texas, with diesel truck enthusiasts in Iowa and pedestrian safety planners in Florida, with white nationalist demonstrators inTennesseeand environmental justice organizers in the Hudson River valley. I have logged many thousands of miles on local highways and country roads, striking up conversations with strangers on park benches and in derelict shopping malls.
I recount those travels and their lessons in my new book,Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down. In it I argue that, in the US, we are at crossroads, poised between a politics of suspicion and retreat, and another founded on more expansive relationships of mutual aid and collective solidarity.
In the many conversations and encounters that led this book, I tried to approach people on their own terms, paying heed to their everyday commitments and concerns, often very different from mine. I have come away with a much better understanding of why things are as stuck as they are, and what it would take to truly change them.
The challenges are real, as I saw one October in Shelbyville, Tennessee.
“How are you feeling?” I asked the Nepali woman behind the counter of a gas station. She replied with a single word and a tight-lipped smile. “Scared”.
Scheduled that Saturday morning in Shelbyville was a“White Lives Matter” political rally. Businesses downtown were shuttered. Police had cordoned off roads heading into the town. A pervasive thrum was in the air, from helicopters circling overhead. Dozens of officers in riot gear massed on the roofs of low buildings.
The October 2017 rally followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where clashes between demonstrators and counter-protesters left dozens injured and one young woman, Heather Heyer, dead. The Shelbyville rally was organized by a southern separatist group called theLeague of the South, working with a larger umbrella of white nationalist groups called the Nationalist Front.
“Which side are you on?” an officer asked as I approached the site. Long metal barricades divided the white nationalists from the counter-protestors who were also gathering that morning. I followed a handful of journalists into the security clearance area for the white nationalist demonstrators. I was hoping to talk with some of them, to try and understand why they had come to think of their own wellbeing in such starkly racist terms.
Everyone was forced to mill around the checkpoint and submit to a pat down in the name of safety. The process was long and arduous, so much so that it helped break the ice between a brown ethnographer and the white nationalists in his midst. Here was something we could complain about together, as if this was a painfully slow line at an airport terminal.
I struck up a conversation with a bearded man who worked at a uniform factory in northern Alabama. He was wearing a red Maga cap, with an American flag draped around his shoulders – flagpoles had been banned. He admitted feeling stupid with a flag on his back. “What would look cool is a Swat vest and a gun,” he suggested, eyeing the officers nearby.
Some of the demonstrators came down to the checkpoint in quasi-military formation, with helmeted young men in rows marching behind plastic shields as a ruddy-faced man with a thick white beard led them in a chant: “Closed borders! White nation! Now we start the deportation!” When they halted, I could see that some of them had swastikas and the letters “KKK” tattooed on their arms.
Styled as foot soldiers, many startlingly young in age, these men were a deliberately provocative spectacle of fascist unity. They were also a minority among those who gathered for the white nationalist rally in Shelbyville. That left me curious about the other demonstrators who had joined in plain clothes. How did these ideas speak to them?
I fell into conversation with a tall white man in a black Carhartt jacket. He didn’t want to divulge who he was, and nor, frankly, did I, but it turned out that he was raised in Brooklyn, not far from the Bronx borough where I was born. In his late 40s, with a salt-and-pepper beard, he had gone to the rally in Charlottesville and had come to Shelbyville for this event.
“I have an affinity for this side,” he admitted. I introduced myself as a writer, and we wound up getting into a long discussion.
“What do you think of this idea of an ethnostate?” I asked the man, bringing up the vision of a Balkanized white nation floated by rally organizers. “What would you do with people like me?”
“What’s your heritage?” he asked.
“My family is from India,” I said. “I was born and raised in this country, but my parents immigrated here.”
“Aren’t you guys Aryans?” Both of us laughed uneasily.
He asked when my family had come to the United States, adding that he had ancestors who came here during the revolutionary war era. “Our ancestors built this country for their posterity. We feel this is our inheritance.”
“Let me tell you why I’m here,” I told him. “In the 1970s, there was a shortage of doctors in the United States. The government put out a call, and a whole bunch of them came from India. My dad’s a cardiologist. Over the years, he’s taken care of thousands of patients, saved a lot of lives. Does that give us a place here, or not?”
“Yeah, that’s a part of our history,” he replied. “We can accept that. We can absorb a certain amount of other cultures.” The way he spoke, he seemed to be thinking of a national organism, its ability to tolerate some degree of foreign bodies in its midst.
Still, the man from Brooklyn insisted, “there’s no living with the other.” What seemed to have gone missing here was the faith that one could live alongside others unlike oneself, sharing a collective life with them rather than living at the other’s expense.
“You gotta put your own air mask on first,” he said. “You gotta take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else. You can’t help people if you cut your own throat.”
Places of belonging can be conceived in defensive and xenophobic ways, as that white nationalist rally had in Shelbyville. But they can also be imagined and sustained in a more hopeful manner, as shared spaces of cultural resistance and transformation.
I think, for example, of the members of theDenton Women’s Interracial Fellowshipin north Texas, who led the effort to desegregate their town in the 1960s. I was privileged to meet some of these courageous women during my research.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Black community of Denton was anchored in a prosperous enclave at the heart of the town, known asQuakertown. Like many other Black townships at time, Quakertown had thrived, with a school and many churches and businesses. Then, in the early 1920s, white civic leaders in Denton led a campaign to appropriate the Black township’s land, raze its buildings and place a public park for white families there instead.
Many Black families were forced to leave Denton altogether, for other towns and states or farther afield. Those who remained rebuilt their community once again on a tract of land south-east of the town, past flour mills and two sets of railway tracks, a distant periphery that remains the nucleus of Denton’s Black population to this day.
I met Alma Clark for the first time at the American Legion Senior Center in south-east Denton in 2017, when she was 89 years old. She scoffed at the ideas of health and sanitation used as rationale for Quakertown’s removal. “We went into the homes of white folk and cooked their food and cleaned their houses. We took care of their children. We were good enough for that,” she told me with a tart smile.
However much labor the Black women and men of Denton contributed to the wellbeing of the town’s white residents, they had been cast into a space of public neglect. Under these circumstances, families in the community turned to strategies of collective support and caretaking.
Women relied on one another to help with their children, as they juggled work and other responsibilities. Families added rooms to their own homes to house Black students admitted to Denton’s universities but denied a place in their dormitories.
In the 1960s, Clark and other Black women in Denton came together with some white women in the town to create what came to be known as the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship. They began by opening their homes to each other, sharing meals for the first time. Eventually, their conversations led to public campaigns that drew dozens of active women in the town. The organization ensured that its membership remained Black and white in equal measure at any given time, and alternated its meetings regularly between Black and white homes.
Women in the fellowship made visible the harsh realities of racial segregation. They led a successful campaign to pave south-east Denton’s streets and equip them with streetlights. They organized voting drives to register new Black voters, and took to visiting local restaurants in interracial pairs to support their desegregation. They distributed cards that encouraged Denton city residents to sign a “good neighbor pledge” that affirmed the right of every person to rent, buy or build a home anywhere they wished, even as social and economic forces conspired to keep people mostly where they were.
The legacy of the Women’s Interracial Fellowship remains widely visible in Denton today. A vivid mural depicting Clark and several other Black women activists with the organization spans both sides of the railway underpass leading into south-east Denton. An art installation commemorating their work for racial justice adorns a small downtown park, close to the central courthouse square from which aConfederate monumentwas finally removed in 2020. Contemporary antiracist organizing in the Black Lives Matter era has drawn from historical struggles in the town, on the more inclusive vision of home and community that activists have long summoned.
“We had to help each other to survive,” Clark recollected to me in 2022, when I returned to Denton for theJuneteenth celebrationthat year.
She went on to add a striking analogy. “It’s like making cornbread. You need meal, you need flour, you need baking powder, you need eggs. You need to put all those ingredients together to make that cornbread. You can’t do anything if you keep them separate.”
All of us have much to lose in the erosion of neighborly concern, the impetus to look out for others we don’t know that well. Neighborliness is a powerful image of collective belonging, especially in a world where relationships span the globe and the consequences of how we live extend to many distant and unseen places.
In saying this, I don’t mean to idealize American neighbors and neighborhoods. Contemporary patterns of isolation draw on deep histories of racial segregation and systemic neglect in the United States, lines that have long been drawn between lives that matter and lives that don’t. At the same time,neighborlinesshas also long been practiced as a more expansive form of conviviality, equipping people to live with the reality of social difference and disagreement.
One afternoon a few years ago, passing through a small town in southern Michigan, I went out to a park to catch up on some notes and phone calls. After some time, a white man in his 60s sat down on the bench beside me, and we fell into conversation. He was slightly drunk, a little red in the eye, and keen to talk. He had recently retired from work as a mechanic at a nearby plant. His wife was ailing, mostly bedridden at home, and he was worried about her medical care.
I can’t remember how the subject of politics came up, but he told me that he had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He also wanted me to understand that this didn’t change what he owed me as a newcomer to his town. No, he didn’t know me from Adam, but our meeting was the Lord’s blessing, he told me, and I ought to have someone around there to call on in case of trouble.
He scribbled down his number and address on a scrap of paper and insisted that I take it. “I don’t care if you’re brown or red or whatever,” he told me, and I believed him.
I was heading out the next morning, but I kept thinking about that unexpected gesture of kindness. It was like a flash of some other solidarity that still remained possible. I picked up a pie at a market nearby, meaning to drop it off for that man and his family. When I pulled up at the address he had shared, the shades were drawn, and no one seemed to be home. I left the pie and a note on the concrete landing of that small tract house clad in blue vinyl siding.
I felt a bit nervous and exposed, walking back to my car. I was, after all, a stranger. But it felt like the right thing to do. He had treated me like a neighbor, and I wanted to reciprocate.
Such aspirations will face serious tests in the years to come. How will people respond to the deportation of families who have lived beside them for decades, or the gutting of hard-won protections for clean water and air, or the removal of books meaningful to the most marginal members of their communities from local school curricula, or the deepening of media foxholes that celebrate masculine aggression and disdain for the struggles of others elsewhere?
Xenophobic and authoritarian politics draw their power from a fear of foreigners and strangers, an idea that the dangers they pose are already around us, needing to be identified and rooted out. Butas Toni Morrison observed, such ideas often reflect “an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging”. The problem lies less with the strangers among us than the strangeness within, the consequences of a feeling of radical estrangement from the world.
In my writing, I try to show howeveryday structures of isolation– at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.
So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?
It may be daunting, the idea of making a common life – in public space, in the pursuit of wellbeing on an imperiled earth, even in the unpredictable span of a conversation – with others unlike ourselves. But we need to find our way back to the communion we may share with those beyond our bounds.
We need to rekindle that open spirit of kinship once again.
Anand Pandianis Krieger-Eisenhowerprofessor ofanthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Parts of this essay were adapted from his book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, out now.
Spot illustrations by Peter Gamlen.