Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down

In this striking account, anthropologist Pandian (Anthropocene Unseen) travels the U.S. seeking to understand America’s growing racial and political divide. Through immersive encounters and ethnographic observations, he hopes to find “a life in common” with his fellow countrymen, but instead finds a “hardening of American life” via the literal and metaphorical walling-off of homes, vehicles, bodies, and minds. The major component of this walled-off life is the calcifying of “American views about others,” a fact he stumbles upon again and again—at a gated community in Florida where the director of security talks to him about residents’ “paranoia,” or a builder’s expo where attendees are focused on making the homes of the rich into “refuges from the danger and insecurity of the world.” Throughout, Pandian gets into numerous gut-churning conversations (he demurely calls them “vivid and challenging”), including one where a white supremacist speculates about what would happen to Asian Americans like the author in an imagined new ethnostate. Yet Pandian is firm that there is, in the words of James Baldwin, “something between” him and his subjects, and that nurturing the connection is still possible (as Baldwin put it: “These are my countrymen and I do care about them and even if I didn’t, there is something between us”). It’s a solemn and extraordinary glimpse of a splintering America. (May)