This book is about four key concepts paired in tension with each other: belonging and bridging and othering and breaking. I’ll go into much greater detail to define each of these and how they are interrelated, but let me offer some brief introductions now to what I mean by these four words.
St. Martin’s Publishing
I believe many of our most vexing social problems share a common structure that is not often revealed when we are just looking at single issues. I believe that the concept of othering, or seeing people not only as different but as less deserving and not of equal dignity as us, allows us to more clearly perceive the underlying structure of many of the problems we are facing, whether we call those problems racism, nationalism, homophobia, or cancel culture.
Breaking is othering in action. When we engage in breaking, we deny the full stories, complexities, and even sometimes the humanity of those we consider other. Their suffering does not count as much as ours. While othering is about one’s status in relationship to different groups, breaking is the practice that undergirds othering.
The solutions that I want to offer to othering and breaking are belonging and bridging.
Belonging serves as an aspiration and orientation in the world. A world built on belonging means one must have what is necessary to co-create and participate in making the world one lives in. Belonging means agency for all members of society. It is closely associated with dignity and being seen. While in a sense we already belong, it is still important that we are acknowledged as belonging and that we acknowledge the belonging of others.
At a foundational, and I would say spiritual, level, belonging also means that there is no other. Whose life is unimportant? Who does not matter? Show me the person not made of stardust. Not only do we all count, but we are all connected. We all belong.
And yet that is not our daily experience. We are situated differently from others. We see the world differently from others. How am I to be my brother’s and sister’s keeper when they see the world so differently than I do? Maybe they even reject the idea that they are my brother or sister. There are many practices, like in my father’s church, willing to embrace the notion that all the members belong but not the nonmembers—not the Chinese people or the eleven-year-old who questioned the rules of belonging. Othering may seem natural and even inevitable. It is neither. But we must do something in a world where we practice not seeing the humanity in the other.
This is where bridging comes in.
Bridging is both a practice and a position. “Can I become a bridge?” I may ask myself. And this immediately calls up other questions: “Do I want to bridge?” Or “Why should I?”
By definition, if someone is other, there is apparently a distance between us. Why don’t I just leave it at that? Maybe they are more than different—maybe they are a threat. Should I bridge or should I protect myself from this other?
We live in a world full of fractures where polarization, division from one another, and isolating ourselves are becoming increasingly normalized. We live in a world where fear is often more visible than love or hope.
But it does not have to be that way. In our effort to protect ourselves in what feels like a dystopian world, to close ourselves off from one another, we are likely to inflict even more pain and add fuel to the fire of the very world we want to avoid.
This book suggests there is another way. This book hopes to acknowledge and reclaim our ability to see one another. And to live with one another.
Where there is an apparent other, there is the need to explore how to bridge. This book is about belonging without othering despite the claim that the world demands something else. This book is an invitation to reject a future organized around fear and death, and instead to organize and call into being a world where we recognize and live into our connection with one another, the Earth, and ourselves. It is known that we share much DNA with apes. What is less discussed is that we also share DNA with all of life. To live into this reality of interbeing is the challenge.
This is not an easy task, and there will be many reasons to think and do otherwise. And yet, life demands life, and I believe bridging is one of our most important ways to see and celebrate one another and ourselves.
The Power of Stories
A slightly different approach to the four concepts I have named would be to ask: “How do we move from a world built on breaking and othering to one built on bridging and belonging?”
One way is through stories.
What do stories have to do with bridging? Stories are vital to the human experience. Indeed, a more fundamental question may be, “What do stories have to do with us?” Stories are what help us make sense of the world and ourselves. We are meaning-making animals, and stories are the tools we use to make meaning.
There is strong evidence that we do not have a coherent sense of ourselves until we develop a story about ourselves. When we remember the past or we anticipate the future, it is largely through stories.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz stated that all knowledge is local, made and held by communities who share experiences, understandings, and expectations with one another. That knowledge is carried in our stories, which in turn shape our world and give it meaning. While some of our stories may appear individual, they are always embedded in a social community, bound up with the community’s set of stories. Indigenous knowledge and history is irreducible from the stories that are told about the world that anchor community in past, present, and future. For more on this see the work of scholars Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe).
Different societies and different eras have different stories. Some cultures think of time as circular; some think of it as linear. The point is not that one group or perspective is right and another one wrong; the point is that our lives and relationships are shaped by these different stories.
We all carry multiple stories, as well as multiple selves, something I’ll return to later. When I first met the Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy, she said, “john, tell me your story.” I responded, “Joanna, as you know, we have many stories, and none are completely true or accurate.” Joanna replied, “Of course. Just pick one.”
I sometimes hesitate to share my own personal stories for several reasons. One is not wanting to be overly identified with a single story. But another reason is because I know that we hear other people’s stories against a backdrop of our own story, as well as of the larger story that society carries. When this happens, my own complex story often gets missed.
As a relatively successful Black man in America, I often experience an overweighted interest in a single story about my life. There is a tendency to make my Blackness my entire story—or, conversely, to assert it is not consequential at all. I remember being with a wonderful white friend in Minneapolis who asked me what it is like to be a Black man in Minneapolis, which at that time was one of the whitest cities in the United States. When I turned the question back to her and asked what it was like to be a white person in Minneapolis, she was puzzled. Her experience of whiteness in Minneapolis was so pervasive, she had no distance to allow her to look at it. Like me as a child in Detroit, surrounded by Blackness I didn’t see, she was living with whiteness all around, and therefore it was invisible. In a sense I can know Blackness only when I have some distance from it or it is in relationship to something else.
The other story is that my race does not matter at all. Some people will insist that being a “good” person means we don’t see one another’s race, gender, or other descriptive category, that our individuality and spirit cannot be reduced to any category. And while it is true we cannot be reduced, it is also a false hope that we are not touched by these categories or that we can remain unaware they exist. Being Black is not my whole story, but neither is the story of me being an individual “I.”
The first story has often come with an invitation for me to share stories of how I “overcame.” To me there is tacit in that request yet another story, one about the others who did not overcome. So an apparently positive story about me—that is, how I became successful—reflects a not-so-positive story about others who were not only less fortunate but maybe, in the mind of the person hearing my story, less deserving.
This story itself—how we are self-made, how we can individually overcome our family history, life circumstances, and the structures and contexts we live in—is part of a larger story in the United States. And I believe that larger story is not only distorting and incomplete but also at times harmful. I don’t know who I, john, am without my parents or my family, without the experiences that shaped how I see the world and who I am in and to the world. Even from my earliest story, there was no me without a larger we.
Excerpted from The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong. From St. Martin’s Publishing. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission.