Introduction for Something Between Us

INTRODUCTION

BUILDING WALLS

World of Concrete, I quickly learned, was a space for genuine enthusiasts. “Concrete is My Addiction,” declared T-shirts for sale in the lobby gift shop. You could take home an acrylic painting of a cement mixer pouring out a sidewalk. The expo floor at this annual trade show in Las Vegas presented acres and acres of concrete mixes, tools, and technologies, interspersed with gleaming machines and hulking construction vehicles.

Anthropologists often wind up in unusual places. That January of 2017, I’d come to this construction industry trade show for a specific reason. Throughout his election campaign the previous year, Donald Trump had promised to build “an impenetrable physical wall” between the United States and Mexico, made from “hardened concrete.” Wherever he campaigned, massive crowds would loudly chant “Build the Wall,” calling for the construction of what would have to be the biggest concrete structure in the history of the United States. I wondered how industry professionals felt about this. There seemed no better place to go than their annual convention.¹

Walk through these corridors, and you could easily imagine why the idea of securing the nation’s borders with concrete might appeal. “Rip open a bag of confidence,” Sakrete promised on the expo’s complimentary bag for attendees. “Count on Concrete,” the American Concrete Pavement Association declared. The mottos were all like this. Build Trust. Build with Strength. Concrete to the Core. “Imagine if he’d said that he was going to build a tall wooden fence,” a young contractor from Denver suggested; “what would people think of that?” Concrete, though, the very idea of it, “impenetrable.” As one industry leader from Texas quipped, “It’s the one thing you want between yourself and the zombie apocalypse.”

It was the third week of January, leading up to the presidential inauguration. One company was selling circular saw blades embossed with Trump’s smiling face, an inaugural special and a magnet for tickled observers. “Made in the US?” I asked, curious.

“China,” like so much else on view here, a salesperson quietly admitted.

On the morning of the inauguration, here and there on the expo floor, people had pulled up the event on their mobile phones. I caught the final minutes of the new president’s address with a few representatives from a small concrete coatings company in western Ohio. Cheers and claps broke the still air of the convention center at the conclusion of that ominous speech.

The team from western Ohio didn’t think the border wall would ever be built. It would cost too much and supplies of portland cement were already low. All the same, a young man named Chris told me, the border had to be secured somehow. It was like spending $1,000 on a home security system but failing to close the door itself. “The border’s like our back door,” he said. “You go and leave it open, and anyone can walk right in.”

“It’s not even a door,” he added with a laugh. “More like a screen door.”

Like most of the other reps from the company, Chris was a millennial. With a trim beard and short, sandy hair, he projected an air of casual self-sufficiency. He spoke with a dose of wry humor about how far he lived from other people. “I don’t really like neighbors,” he remarked.

I was struck by the mismatch between the salesman’s genial manner and the suspicions that he voiced, his sense of anyone beyond his home or country as a potential threat. I wondered, as we talked amidst that sea of construction equipment, what it would take to build genuine warmth and concern for outsiders in this country, rather than such walls.

Over the last eight years, I’ve crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, pursuing conversation and debate between the coasts and heartland. I set out in 2016 to grasp the appeal of the border wall that Trump had promised, the fantasy of wrapping the country in a stark, symbolic barrier. I wanted to understand the power of that campaign slogan, “Build the Wall,” which, to me, felt willfully cruel.² What I learned is that the idea appealed to many Americans because it resonated with the burgeoning walls of their daily lives. Time and again, I encountered people who thought of the country’s borders in relation to the more familiar barriers they lived with and took for granted: household doors and fences, everyday safety and security devices, even the body’s reliance on the protection of skin.

“I don’t leave my doors unlocked,” a patrol officer I met in North Dakota told me. “I don’t think the nation should leave its doors unlocked either.”

We are accustomed to thinking of polarization as a matter of politics and social identity, as a kind of modern-day tribalism.³ This book argues that we need to pay more attention instead to the everyday walls and divides that Americans have come to rely on in their daily lives. Insider versus outsider, familiar versus stranger, safety versus threat: these stark distinctions are anchored and sustained by the physical makeup of so much of contemporary American life—from fortified homes and neighborhoods to bulked-up cars and trucks, from visions of the body as an armored fortress to media that shut out contrary perspectives. These interlocking divides make it more difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously; harder to acknowledge the needs of strangers, to trust their motives and empathize with their struggles. To grasp the hardening of American views about others, we have to look at the hardening of daily life.⁴

Indifference is a kind of personal insulation. Something happens in the world, but it makes no difference to how you feel, what you think. James Baldwin described it as a “death of the heart,” the price America paid for racial segregation: “You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall.”⁵ The everyday walls of American life make for cascading lines between inside and out: between the inner worlds that people care most about, and the places beyond neglected at their expense; between those who can afford to shield themselves from the outside world, and others left beyond to fend for themselves as best they can. This book pursues these many walls, and the collective life we may yet build beyond them.

*   *   *

Early in 2017, I attended a gun show in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. My hand was stamped with the word “KNIFE” when I paid the entrance fee. Inside, there were thousands of handguns, rifles, and other weapons packed onto the tables of a crowded hall. Many of the vendors had holsters and other rigs designed for concealed-carry weapons. I spent some time talking to a man representing a brand called Thunderwear. A woman in jeans walking her dog down the street; a man running shirtless at the beach; another in hospital scrubs, sporting a confident smile and a stethoscope around his neck: all of them, their poster implied, could be wearing a snug spandex holster without anyone knowing. Some people buy Thunderwear, the salesman told me, because it’s the most comfortable way to wear your gun to bed at night.

I came away from the gun show with a sense of how complicated feelings of threat and danger could be. What mattered most when it came to safety? There were two-dollar faux Terrorist Hunting Permit stickers available for each of fifty states, as if they were lurking everywhere unseen: “No bag limit, tagging not required.” There was the man who told me how exposed he’d felt driving through a major snowstorm in Baltimore a few years back: it wasn’t the snow that left him anxious; it was the fact that he had to drive the city with all his guns stowed in a locker that day. Then there were the bumper stickers on the Land Cruiser beside my rental car out front: “Smoking is safer than liberalism” and “I ♥ MY CARBON FOOTPRINT.”⁶

As American schools convulse with regular shootings, calls abound in conservative circles for a “fortification of soft targets.”⁷ Measures proposed for the “hardening” of schools include bulletproof doors and windows, metal detectors, armed teachers and administrators, even ballistic blankets and whiteboards. School security alone has already become a multibillion-dollar industry, even as the effectiveness of such measures remains unclear.⁸ “To embrace a fortress mentality is to reject liberal democracy itself,” Sarah Jones writes in a reflection on the appeal of hardened spaces to American conservatives and liberals alike.⁹ And indeed, the troubling logic of hardening can be found in much of contemporary American life.

Consider this well-known motto and promise from the home security company ADT: “a line in the sand between your family and an uncertain world.” Americans are bunkering now in increasingly isolated homes and secured compounds, without regular exposure to people they don’t know. Nearly one out of five American homes in a residential community is secured today by community walls or fences, a development that builds on a century of intentional segregation and suburban white flight. But the retreat of everyday life and leisure into more secluded spaces has also unfolded at a more intimate scale. The front porch sessions with neighbors and passersby that once epitomized American social life have given way to more private gatherings on the backyard deck, or time with the television and other screens indoors. Such changes lessen the chance for happenstance conversation with neighbors and strangers, and the trust in social difference that such interactions can build.¹⁰

The spaces in which we shelter change our sense of the world beyond. Stepping outside can feel daunting in a society of cascading walls. It’s little wonder that when Americans leave their homes, they do so more and more in automobiles styled as armored enclosures. In recent years, imposing vehicles like SUVs and trucks have come to dominate the American car market, far outpacing sales for smaller sedans. These are automobiles designed with aggressive profiles and built as defensive steel cocoons, often marketed as ways to survive an uncertain and even hostile world. As an automotive designer in Los Angeles told me, such vehicles appeal in a society that is “suffering a case of insecurity.” When people on foot and bicycle have to share their streets with drivers in such armored cockpits, the consequences can be deadly; pedestrian deaths on American roadways have soared by more than 50 percent over the last decade.

The fortress mindset thrives on feelings of suspicion, and the urge to protect oneself can make shared spaces and resources more dangerous than they already are. Americans are often encouraged to buy what they can to fortify and even seal off their own individual bodies, as shared public infrastructure is allowed to decay. Think of bottled sports drinks like BodyArmor or BioSteel. The coronavirus pandemic supercharged such ideas, setting off a boom in personal disinfectant products and touchless technology, making it easier to deny the truth that we depend on one another for our well-being, as seen too in the deep resistance to face masks and vaccination in the United States. I think of a middle-aged white businessman from Michigan with whom I debated the pandemic for many months. A staunch libertarian, he rejects compulsory public health precautions on the grounds that they deny “my feelings, my rights, my personal body.”

Regular exposure to other points of view could complicate such die-hard convictions. But our fractured media have helped propel these social and spatial divisions. Partisan networks and social media are deepening the existing fissures of American society, raising invisible walls of mind over the physical divides that people live with already. Facebook is like “the 21st century equivalent to the suburban tract developments of Levittown,” designer Cliff Kuang has written, a digital space in which “the only voices we hear are those of virtual neighbors who think exactly like us.”¹¹ Take a walk with your eyes glued to such feeds, and the world begins to approximate an open-air cell, with each of us locked into a world of our own.

A few years ago, I had the chance to visit one of William Levitt’s massive “Levittown” developments, not far from where I live now in Baltimore. Built on 22 square miles of farmland in the 1950s, the Pennsylvania development eventually totaled more than 17,000 homes, each of which was laid out in one of four basic prototypes. Intended as a white community, Levittown was infamous for the violent reaction to a Black couple who tried to settle there in 1957, which stifled its racial integration.¹² It was a beautiful spring day when I visited, and people were surprisingly willing to chat with a brown stranger walking down the street. The houses and porches had a warm face, reflecting many personal touches that had been added to the original uniform designs. But all of this was within one of the subdivisions, on one of its quiet residential streets. On the outside, along the parkway, the feeling was profoundly different, with high fences and hedges lining the road and few walkers on streets laid out for speeding cars. Like so many American communities, the space was open on the inside but closed to the outside.

Walls at home and on the road, walls for the body and the mind: this long archipelago of ordinary divides extends into the smallest arenas of daily worlds, shielding many Americans from the possible unease of foreign people and ideas, propelling skepticism about the collective good. Longstanding patterns of neighborhood racial segregation have fueled prejudice against social outgroups in the United States, as many scholars have shown.¹³ The proliferating walls of contemporary American life bring such divides down to a more intimate and everyday level, deepening the gulf between self and other, insider and outsider.¹⁴

The easy give and take of neighbors has long been a “compass for maintaining our democratic bearings,” political philosopher Nancy Rosenblum observes, a reminder of how to coexist with people we don’t know that well.¹⁵ But in an atomized society, others become phantoms all too easily, grist for the mill of resentment and mistrust. Societies built around hardened boundaries—gates and walls, seals and armor, containers and dividers—tend to produce exclusionary viewpoints. And this is a problem that implicates all of us in varying ways, whether liberal or conservative, immigrant or native-born, white or Black or brown, a problem we have to find our way around.

*   *   *

My own parents emigrated to the United States from India in 1972, and my siblings and I were born and raised in this country. We spent a lot of time in India as children. But the United States was home, even if there was somewhere else in the world where we also belonged. As with so many other immigrant families here, however, this basic faith of ours was shaken in 2016, when the question of whether we truly belonged snapped into sharper focus than at any other moment in my lifetime. Again and again, people we knew—even my own father—were accosted with that taunt, Go back to your own country. The idea of the border wall was a magnet for such expressions of a harsh nativist politics, and I felt compelled to grapple with its appeal, as an anthropologist but also as an Indian American with children of my own.

I began to think about this book project on the morning of November 9th in 2016. Like so many others, I was thrown by the outcome of the presidential election held the previous day. I could count on one hand the number of people I knew who had voted for Trump. Most people I knew seemed somehow crushed and numb with disbelief that day and in the days that followed. What President Obama said in his farewell address in Chicago a couple of months later was as true of me as anyone else:

For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.¹⁶

I had to acknowledge that even as an anthropologist, I knew very little about this country where I was born and raised, where I lived and worked. I began to strike up conversations with people I might pass but never stop to talk with: others sitting at nearby café tables, staff on my university campus, clerks at local stores. A few weeks after the election results became clear, I attended a victory rally for Trump in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a charged and unsettling experience.¹⁷ And over the months and years that followed, I traveled to many places in the United States where I had never been, trying to make sense of a circumstance I found deeply troubling but completely opaque.

I was far from alone in doing such things. Sitting one night over a plate of fried rice at a Chinese American diner in Rock Springs, Wyoming, I caught glimpses of a Fox News segment about another East Coast professor with a research agenda similar to mine. The chyrons across the bottom of the screen seemed to revel in this tide of newfound liberal attention, with glosses like “PROFESSOR TO STUDY THE MYSTERY OF TRUMP VOTERS” and “ELITES STRUGGLE TO MAKE SENSE OF TRUMP VICTORY.” The truck driver sitting further down the counter scoffed, making it clear that he wasn’t impressed. “There ain’t no mystery to Trump voters,” he blurted out, talking back to the pundits on the screen. “Just gettin’ tired of being pushed around and shit on.”

I didn’t agree with what that truck driver said, but everything seemed to conspire to make any possibility of mutual understanding between us laughable, even problematic. Such narratives of legitimate grievance and rightful vengeance were rife, and I wanted to find a way to write against them. But to do this effectively as an ethnographer, I had to take seriously the chance of connection, even sympathy, in highly fraught circumstances. I had to entertain the possibility of what James Baldwin recalled feeling among other Americans abroad, even those bent on “denying the only kin they have” for reasons of race and prejudice. “These are my countrymen and I do care about them and even if I didn’t, there is something between us,” Baldwin movingly observed in his 1965 debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University.¹⁸ That profound phrase—“something between us”—evokes possible relationships as well as the barriers that can make them impossible. Such is the texture of this book, and the idea that has shaped its title.

I rely in this book on stories and travels across the United States, vivid and challenging encounters with salesmen and truck drivers, police officers and urban planners, activists for social and environmental justice. Over the last eight years, I’ve wandered into trade shows for homebuilders and medical suppliers. I’ve talked to organizers for migrant rights at rallies before the national Capitol and to white nationalists at a White Lives Matter rally in Tennessee. I’ve visited GMC dealerships in Los Angeles and a truck festival in Iowa, a bottled water convention in Texas and small towns in the Hudson River Valley reeling from water pollution. I attended a glitzy libertarian festival in Las Vegas, and in Georgia I pursued intense discussions with one of the country’s leading conservative cartoonists. I’ve logged many thousands of miles on local highways and country roads, striking up conversations with strangers on park benches and in derelict shopping malls. This investigation of everyday walls has demanded openness, often vulnerability, from an Indian American domestic traveler. But I’ve come to see that people are far more complicated than they may seem from a distance.¹⁹

Take social life in India, for example, still imagined all too easily by foreign observers as a land of fixed ideas and stubborn social boundaries. Years of sustained fieldwork as an anthropologist in India have taught me otherwise, helping me to see the deeply diverse and creative ways in which people often engage the divide between self and other. Such dynamics are social but also spatial, I came to understand, shaped by the architecture of homes and communities, by traditional structures like verandas and courtyards that have long supported a fundamentally open relationship between the inside and outside of people’s lives, and by modern efforts to build on these legacies, such as Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s effort to imagine a future “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high / Where knowledge is free / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments / By narrow domestic walls.”²⁰

As an anthropologist, I’ve learned that it takes patience and imagination to unravel what people truly care about. We try to meet people with as much empathy and understanding as we can muster, even in the face of profound disagreement. An ethnography, the kind of book that anthropologists tend to write—literally, a written account of a community or people—seeks to convey the lived experience of a place through intimate stories of encounter. And these details matter especially when it comes to situations that people tend to interpret in starkly different ways. Ethnography is a uniquely effective means to relate both the power of structural forms and forces, as well as the resistance and ambivalence they occasion in the thickets of daily life.²¹

This book seeks to convey both the difficulties posed by a society of pervasive walls and the unexpected openings they nevertheless allow. Working as an anthropologist, I show how these overlapping divides orchestrate American life as a patterned reality, one that still carries the potential for novel forms of solidarity and critique. I pursue the challenge of thinking beyond the twists and turns of our immediate present, seeking to outline the larger cultural fabric that frames these difficulties, but also makes alternatives possible. For while our impasses draw from deep American histories of segregation and suspicion, they also surface more radical visions for a life in common with others.

The narrative is organized into four sections, each focusing on a different kind of hardening of American life: walls for the home and road, body and mind. Each section unfolds as a series of stories or dispatches from different places around the country. In each of these sections, I try to show how everyday commitments to hard lines surface in different milieus, but I also come around to describing in each of these sections, in the company of activists and social critics, how to imagine and pursue a dismantling of these ordinary barriers.

The first section explores the changing nature of the American home, its reconfiguration as a space organized to lock out strangers and other threats, and what it would mean to live instead with a wider sense of collective belonging. I examine the trajectory of the house as bastion in contemporary America, tracking a waning of social space around and beyond the home that turns potential neighbors into strangers. I trace legacies of residential segregation and suburbanization that continue to propel these developments and show how activist movements for desegregation articulate a more expansive vision of neighborliness.

Americans spend as much time within cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles as they do in open environments beyond their homes and workplaces. It is therefore essential to consider how our experience of vehicles and roadways shapes our understanding of the wider world. The chapters in the second section examine recent developments in American automotive culture that conceive of the world as a space of danger and aggression, demanding defensive measures of protection rather than openness and exposure. Why are Americans so drawn to armored vehicles that promise insulation, that render us insensible to the welfare of those beyond these shells? What will it take to develop streetscapes more suitable for pedestrians, cyclists, and others?

Protection comes down to the body, that fragile vessel of flesh and bone in which we pass through the world, weather its storms. The body is home to the most visceral sensations of vulnerability and danger. Here, too, walls proliferate and demand fortification, from the skin and its boundaries, to clothing and other layers of armor, to the many environmental barriers designed to secure what we absorb and ingest. The third section examines a series of imperatives to armor the body of the American nation—and the individual bodies of white citizens in particular—with defensive walls. I ask what it means to live instead with the vulnerability of a greater state of exposure, most especially for racial others left beyond the span of such care.

Some of the hardest and most stubborn walls are intangible in form. As the events of recent years have shown, Americans hold profoundly different ideas about what is simply real, ideas fed by social media and partisan news platforms that often verge on the irreconcilable. These walls of the mind may seem fleeting and ephemeral, yet they are just as powerful as anything made of brick or concrete. In the fourth section, I turn to the intangible walls that frame ideas and imagination in the contemporary United States, lines that mark out the space of the plausible from what remains unbelievable. I also engage with efforts to think beyond such isolating perspectives and the media portals and devices that carry them.

Walls at home and on the road, for the body and the mind: the lines running through this book are different faces of a more basic line between self and other, one also complicated and confounded in many important ways. Each of the four sections of the book moves toward such openings, and these threads are drawn together in a conclusion that strikes a more hopeful note. I try to show, through these particular chapters, how more recent endeavors in mutual aid and collective caretaking can help us see the real crossroads of this moment: the hardening of divisions and suspicions, but also the chance we have to move beyond them.

*   *   *

It was a gorgeous winter day in southern Arizona, sunlight breaking through the clouds to catch the red earth and high grasses, an occasional saguaro cactus keeping watch from some high promontory. I’d gone out into the Sonora desert that day with a volunteer crew from the Tucson Samaritans, an organization that maintains water stations for migrants finding their way through that forbidding landscape. We walked along seasonal streambeds full of tattered backpacks, their polyester threads coming apart and mingling with the leaves and pebbles underfoot. “There are so many stories,” one of the volunteers told me as we picked our way through thickets of scrub, leaving jugs of water and packets of food in places where people were known to rest.

The volunteer was a retired schoolteacher in her late seventies. Week after week, she came out onto these trails, carrying as much as her shoulders could handle, tending to the needs of people she almost never saw. As we headed back to Tucson that afternoon, I wondered about the yellow toy car she was holding in her hands. Then we pulled over beside a wooden cross, marking the place where a young woman was found stumbling down that road some years ago, a stillborn baby in her arms. Every time they passed this way, the former teacher explained, she would leave something here for that stillborn boy.

“All of us could have been someone else,” she told me. “What if I was walking in the desert, and I delivered this child? I’m taking care of him. I don’t want him forgotten.”²²

The next day, I returned to the spot to pay my respects. A Border Patrol officer flagged me down at a checkpoint further down the road, and we fell into conversation. The young officer told me that he’d sympathized at first with the people traversing these hills. Then it began to nag at him, the feeling they were lying about who they were, why they’d come. He knew the roadside cross, he’d driven past it many times, but never stopped to take a look. “You get desensitized,” he told me. “You hear it often enough and something in you shuts off.”²³

The border guard cupped his fingers as he spoke these words, turning them in the air as if he was switching off a dial or turning the lock of an invisible door. A pair of sunglasses hid his eyes from view, mirroring the road back at me. We weren’t that far from the line of concrete and steel that marked the border between the United States and Mexico. But the guard was speaking of another kind of border, a different kind of wall, one built not with mortar but mistrust.

Whether the plight of refugees or the recent pandemic, the climate crisis or systemic racism, so much turns on the care and concern we can muster for lives and circumstances beyond our own. And yet the deep divides of our national life in the United States have made effective action on such matters a serious and sometimes intractable challenge. Why is it so difficult to acknowledge and address the intertwining of our lives with others elsewhere?

It may be tempting to take such difficulties as a sign of moral or personal failure. But our feelings for others are structural realities as much as personal qualities. Ordinary environments and circumstances of life shape the possibility or impossibility of meaningful relationships, what we feel or can’t feel for others. Every means of isolation, whether grand or minuscule in scale, has a role to play in these dynamics. When others are experienced as distant abstractions, it’s easy to dismiss what they might say or need.²⁴ At the same time, commitments to real relationships with others in a spirit of social solidarity and mutual aid—“where we choose to help each other out, share things, and put time and resources into caring for the most vulnerable,” as Dean Spade puts it—can change these difficult dynamics in profound ways.²⁵

Across the country in 2020, the pandemic spurred a return to socializing with neighbors on front yards and porches.²⁶ Countless cities and towns carved out new places for walking, biking, and outdoor life—new ways of sharing public space with people both known and unknown.²⁷ And movements for racial justice and solidarity with the vulnerable brought millions of Americans together that year and beyond, spurring more radical commitments to collective caretaking, redrawing the line between stranger and kin.²⁸

On the one hand, the pandemic had supercharged an idea of the body as an armored enclosure, to seal off against the dangers of the world beyond. On the other hand, calls abounded to redesign personal and public space for conviviality rather than isolation, for coming back into new ways of living more intentionally and meaningfully in the company of others. Even as the enduring strife of those years underscored the tenacity of political and social polarization in the United States, these small experiments in belonging suggested the genesis of something very different: “a vision of a different society,” as the abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba put it, “built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.”²⁹ Such efforts anchor the vision of an alternative collective life that animates this book.

Conviviality is a kind of “radical openness” in the social sphere, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy has argued, a rejection of the categorical divides that sustain racism, an ability instead “to live with alterity without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.”³⁰ Less a fantasy of social harmony under fraught circumstances, conviviality brings into focus ways of dealing with conflict and living at ease with difference, through everyday circumstances of encounter and infrastructures of connection.³¹ Commons, parks, and open streetscapes; living quarters and resources arranged to encourage social awareness instead of solipsism; communication platforms to nurture contrary lines of thought: such spaces can nurture the capacity to live and thrive alongside others unlike oneself, working against the tendency to reject and retreat.³²

These are possibilities with global significance. In recent decades, dozens of countries around the world have met aspiring migrants and refugees in need with fortified borders and imposing walls, marking continent after continent with lines that often reach hundreds of miles in length.³³ Such gestures extend, to the largest scale, histories and patterns of enclosure that have accompanied the development of capitalist economies and individualistic societies over many centuries in Europe, the United States, and beyond.³⁴ In the face of such histories and their contemporary echoes, there is much at stake in learning to ask what kinds of boundaries are truly necessary and sustaining. As Todd Miller puts it in Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, “what kind of raw and beautiful world lies beyond the fences and walls that confine not just our bodies, but also our imagination, our speech, our very humanity?”³⁵

The promise of such vision comes through with so many of the people and stories I’ve encountered through this research. I think, for example, of the Black and white women of the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship who led a local struggle for desegregation in Texas in the 1960s, coming together in a north Texas town that had exiled its entire Black population just a few decades earlier. I think of a Providence-based writer and activist who set out in 2016 to walk barefoot across the United States to protest the looming climate catastrophe; he perished in a tragic collision with an SUV in the Florida Panhandle, and yet his story invites a serious rethinking of our American streetscapes with his vision of a roadway hospitable to all living beings. And I think of a young woman I met in Ohio who grew up on a daily diet of conservative talk radio, caught in the crossfire between a “liberal wahoo” mother and a father who’d condemn even the free pencils from elementary school as “government handouts.” She eventually left college to become a menstrual equity activist and coined one of the most popular slogans of the 2017 Women’s Marches: “Shed Walls, Don’t Build Them.”

“Some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences, and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us,” Audre Lorde observed.³⁶ These words remind us of a dissident heritage essential to the United States that we know now, the critical vision of those who have understood the occupation of this continent and its capitalist logic otherwise, those who have given voice to the possibility of more radical forms of American collective life. In this spirit, throughout this book, I pay heed to the work of activists of many kinds—migrant and refugee advocates, feminist organizers, agitators for shared space, clean water, and safe roads—in order to consider what a more just and open American society could look and feel like. Such work can help us imagine and cultivate social alternatives and unexpected forms of connection across the rigid lines we take so easily for granted.³⁷

There is no better way to learn once again how to meet strangers in this land as potential kin. We need to confront the many walls we’ve come to live with, and what it could mean to take them down. The pages that follow take some steps in that direction.

Notes

1. For another ethnographic account of the same convention, see Georgina Voss, “Welcome to the SXSW of Concrete,” The Atlantic, March 3, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/concrete-america…

2. See Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” The Atlantic, October 3, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-po…

3. See, for example, Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

4. This argument is synthesized in my 2022 essay in The Guardian, “Look Around You. The Way We Live Explains Why We Are Increasingly Polarized,” The Guardian, January 16, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jan/16/look-around-you-why-incr…

5. As quoted in the film by Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro, 2016.

6. Palpable here is “the ineluctable siren’s call of a ‘normal’ that never existed in the first place—or rather, a normality that is inseparable from the death and ruin which that normality itself produced” described by Patrick Blanchfield in many trenchant essays on American gun culture, such as the one that includes this passage: “Death Drive Nation,” Late Light, November 2022. https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation

7. Jamelle Bouie, “A Gun-Filled America Is a World of Fear and Alienation,” New York Times, May 9, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/opinion/allen-texas-shooting-guns.ht…

8. Katie Reilly, “Schools Are Spending Billions on Safety Measures to Stop Mass Shootings. It’s Not Clear They Work.” Time, June 16, 2022. https://time.com/6187656/school-safety-mass-shootings/

9. Sarah Jones, “The Hardening of America: From Schools to Starbucks Bathrooms, a Pernicious Idea Gains Ground,” The Intelligencer, June 8, 2022. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/the-hardening-of-america.html

10. “Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow,” Jane Jacobs observes in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 72.

11. Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant, User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play (New York: MCD Books, 2019).

12. Jake Blumgart, “What Will Become of Levittown, Pennsylvania?” Bloomberg, March 1, 2016. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-01/what-will-become-of-…

13. See, for example, Ryan D. Enos, who argues that geographic separation encourages “the separation of people in psychological space and, ultimately, political space” in The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

14. As Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins note in Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 119, “our government could not build such a wall at the border if we were not already living within metaphorical walls in our towns and cities, walls that separate citizens from noncitizens. The wall at the border snakes itself into our communities, dividing schools and classrooms, hospitals, and neighborhoods.”

15. Nancy Rosenblum, “The Good Neighbor in a Time of Crisis,” HistPhil, August 19, 2020. https://histphil.org/2020/08/19/the-good-neighbor-in-a-time-of-crisis/

16. “President Obama’s Farewell Address,” White House Archives, January 10, 2017. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/farewell

17. Anand Pandian, “The Casual Menace of a Trump Rally,” Sapiens, October 27, 2020. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/trump-rally-hostility/

18. “Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, June 14, 1965. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_151-sn00z71m54. I am deeply grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this manuscript for bringing these words to my attention.

19. Given the fraught nature of its subject, I use pseudonyms throughout this book, unless I am writing about those whose work and views are already public, or those who wanted to be described with their own names.

20 Rabindranath Tagore, “Gitanjali 35,” in Gitanjali: Song Offerings (London: Macmillan, 1913).

21. I make this argument in methodological terms in A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

22. My gratitude to Jason De León for introducing me to volunteers from the Tucson Samaritans. As De León reflects on the significance of the organization’s care work, and the difficult challenge of remembering those effaced by the violence of American border policy, he writes “the desert has already started to erase this person, along with whatever violence and horror she or he experienced. This event will soon be forgotten before it was ever known”: The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 27.

23. See Francisco Cantú’s deeply affecting account of the psychic toll of Border Patrol work in The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018).

24. “When groups live physically, socially, and emotionally separate lives, they are far less likely to empathize with each other,” Michael Carolan observes in A Decent Meal: Building Empathy in a Divided America (Stanford: Redwood Press, 2021), 9.

25. Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (New York: Verso Books, 2020), 8.

26. Spike Carlsen, “The Forgotten Front Porch Is Making a Comeback,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-forgotten-front-porch-is-making-a-come…

27. Helen Rowe, “Is Temporary the New Permanent? COVID Street Experiments Open Our Eyes to Creating Better Cities,” The Conversation, March 18, 2021. https://theconversation.com/is-temporary-the-new-permanent-covid-street…

28. See The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (New York: Verso Books, 2020), by the Care Collective.

29. Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-…. For more on this vision of a transformative justice, see Kaba’s book of collected essays, We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).

30. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), xi.

31. Amanda Wise and Greg Noble, “Convivialities: An Orientation,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 37, no. 5 (2016): 423–431.

32. “The better power of the commons is to point to a way to view what’s broken in sociality, the difficulty of convening a world conjointly, although it is inconvenient and hard, and to offer incitements to imagining a livable provisional life,” Lauren Berlant suggests in “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393–419.

33. Élisabeth Vallet, “The World Is Witnessing a Rapid Proliferation of Border Walls,” Migration Information Source, Migration Policy Institute, March 2, 2022. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-proliferation-number-bord…

34. See Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

35. Todd Miller, Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2021).

36. Audre Lorde, “Difference and Survival,” in I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, edited by Rudolph Byrd, Johnnetta Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201.

37. There is promise still in the nurturing of contact, in situations that allow for “the perception of common interests and common humanity” between different groups of people, as social psychologist Gordon Allport put it in his influential 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Decades of work in “contact theory” have shown that meaningful connections can overcome feelings of anxiety and threat, softening social boundaries.