The Walls Between Us: Can We Truly Understand Each Other? – Anand Pandian

Airdate: June 25, 2025

Julie Rose: How do you stay open in a world that keeps telling you to close off?

Anand Pandian: If you're hanging out, you do it on the back deck instead of on the front porch, such that you've completely lost an everyday culture of seeing strangers, of interacting with people that you don't know. All of these different dimensions of our daily lives have created almost a kind of infrastructure of discomfort with difference itself.

Julie Rose: Hey, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a show about sticking with moments that challenge us even when they're uncomfortable. And I know you're probably wondering, "Why would anybody choose to be uncomfortable?" But I know from personal experience, and you probably do too, that sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can stay open and curious about it. And that is what we're here to explore, so let's get Uncomfy.

I read a new book recently that really has me thinking about the various barriers that I've built around myself and really that we all build around ourselves and our communities. And sometimes they're literal. Like, I have a fence around my entire property, my house, and my yard. And sometimes these walls can be more psychological, the ways that we keep our distance from things that are Uncomfy. Like, I often find myself looking away, averting my eyes from the person who panhandles at the parking lot of my grocery store to create some emotional distance, right? So, the book is called "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down." It's by Johns Hopkins University Anthropology professor Anand Pandian, who joins me now. Professor, welcome. Thanks for your time.

Anand Pandian: Thank you so much, Julie. It's really a wonderful privilege to be able to talk to you about this new book of mine.

Julie Rose: I'm curious how this has affected you personally. What is a wall that you've been working to tear down in your own life as a result of the work you did on this book?

Anand Pandian: In many ways, the book itself grows out of a realization that my life, however much I'd enjoyed it and however familiar it was to me was built around certain walls and divides that I'd come to take for granted, that essentially kept me more or less in the company for the most part of people who agreed with me ideologically. And so, when the 2016 election proved such a surprising outcome for so many people, it was an occasion for me as well to do a little self-reflection, as an anthropologist, but also as an Indian-American, as a father of two children, as someone who has a real stake in collective life in this country, and a real commitment to making that livable for all of us, including my own family of immigrant people.

Julie Rose: Can you gimme an example of, of what tearing that wall down, or at least, like, poking a hole in it has looked like for you?

Anand Pandian: For starters, I, at the very beginning of that process in late 2016, I simply began to strike up conversations with people I shared my university campus with that I kind of just never really talked to before, in cafes, in public places, in my own city of Baltimore, striking up conversations with people at adjoining tables, just really trying in a more innocent and straightforward way to connect with people I didn't know. I wound up going to a Trump victory rally, uh, just a couple weeks after his election victory, which was a really difficult experience. I felt pretty alone, pretty isolated, and anti-immigrant chanting of the kind that there was a lot of at that event made me feel personally uncomfortable. But on the other hand, the people I was sitting next to were also really welcoming and I felt a real disconnect or a real tension between the really aggressive, xenophobic rhetoric that was coming from the stage of that arena and a kind of friendliness that I experienced from the people around me. And this is something that really did lead me to begin to traveling around the country, eventually doing anthropological field work in more than a dozen states, meeting hundreds of strangers over the last few years, having a lot of conversations, some of them really difficult, some arguments, some less charged, uh, conversations, if you will, and trying to come to a different understanding of what ails this country and what it might take to take it in a different direction.

Julie Rose: So, what's something that you took away from that, that Trump victory rally then where you were hearing, hearing one message from the stage and then you were getting a, a warmer than expected perhaps for you reception from the people you were sitting next to?

Anand Pandian: Yeah, you know, I, I remember really well, for example, standing in line, the security line to, to get into that event, and there was a young man standing in front of me who was talking actually about how uncomfortable it made him to go into the city of Philadelphia. He lived in a smaller town outside of Philadelphia, and he was talking about how unsettling it was for him just to even enter that city and how he'd never do so without a gun in his glove compartment, which I found different. We don't have firearms in our house and it's, it's something that feels very much like an alien culture to me, and here was a moment that I felt like I was in earshot of someone who was in the world in a very different way. But then, to be honest, we kind of started chatting, and it turned out his niece attended the university where I teach. It turned out that she majored in a department that was housed in a building next door to mine. It turned out, in other words, that we had an unexpected connection that we talked a little about.

And it was a real reminder that when you talk to people, when you try to take seriously what it is that gets them up in the morning each day, what it is that motivates them in terms of whatever they do, whatever they'd like to see in the world, all of us have far more diverse points of view, interests, commitments than we typically think, and it takes work to arrive at that, and it does, of course, take a certain kind of discomfort; it takes a willingness to put yourself in a place where you didn't necessarily expect to go and to meet that with some curiosity as you said yourself.

Julie Rose: Perhaps you've heard this, uh, criticism, because I've certainly heard it around the concept of Uncomfy and people who are in bridge building, doing bridge building work will often hear it, which is, Okay, sure. These are, these are people. I can, you know, yeah, we all put our pants on the same way, right? I get that, but also, the things that they are advocating for are harmful to me or to people I care about. And so, I mean, who, we have to have walls. We have to push back. We need to have barriers. We need to, that's the thing about walls, right, that they, yes, they divide, but they also protect."

Anand Pandian: Absolutely, and I wanna clarify this is not a book that is advocating in any way that all of us enter into some condition of radical exposure or radical vulnerability. I'm sitting indoors. You're indoors. The reasons that we have these environments that we have, they do a lot for us. It's important that we have them, but at the same time, I think that there's a lot at stake in thinking about the nature of these divides, the extent to which they're completely impermeable to the outside, to difference, to the kind of exposure that can be edifying, that can help us grow, or contrary or contrarily completely closed off to those forms of possibility.

Julie Rose: What is the question that we should asking about each barrier, boundary, wall that we have in our lives, or what, what is the series of questions that you think would lead to a more productive result?

Anand Pandian: "What would it mean to open that door a little bit?" "What would it mean to crack that window a little bit?" "What would it mean to take seriously the experience of those on the outside rather than solely those of us on the inside?" "To what extent am I really all that different from those who are out there, and if it were the case that I was in their position rather than where I am now, wouldn't I be grateful if someone was willing to see their own comfort from a different point of view?" I remember very well a migrant aid volunteer that I met in the Sonora Desert. She was part of a group called the Tucson Samaritans that go out regularly to leave water and food for people passing through the desert as refugees, as people crossing into the United States, really with nowhere else to go so often. And she told me at one point in explaining why she does this work in her seventies, mind you, after having retired from a full career, why she still comes out to an environment as harsh as that desert environment in the sun, the heat and all that to do this work. She said to me, "Well, you know, all of us could have been someone else,” and the work she was doing was a kind of recognition or an enactment of, of, of that way of, of seeing her own personal interconnectedness with others whose suffering might be at a scale completely unlike her own. I think that's important to be able to see that. My worry is that the more we shelter ourselves, the more we isolate ourselves, the more we retreat to a space of suspicion and mistrust, the less capable we're going to be of engaging in that more empathetic manner with the real travails of others elsewhere.

Julie Rose: I'm gonna admit that maybe my favorite section of the book, my favorite story, each chapter sort of involves you going into a different place that was deeply Uncomfy in a lot of ways, um, places that were outside of your own world. But there's this one section where you acknowledge that you, um, had over the course of, I don't know, maybe your adult life, largely sidelined childhood friends who leaned conservative, which I think is totally something a lot of us can relate to, whether it's conservative or liberal, kind of being like, "Oh, that one person, you know, or whatever, I'm gonna unfriend them on Facebook." And so, you rekindled, though, with, with a guy who was actually a real good friend of yours as a kid. His name's Armen. I'd love to have you tell us a little bit, first of all, about why him, and what you were like as kids.

Anand Pandian: Armen and I grew up just down the street from each other in a suburb in Los Angeles. We carpooled together every morning. We sat next to each other in our science homeroom in seventh grade. When we were younger, in middle school in particular, we were much closer. But as happens, we kind of fell into our own respective sets of friends, our own respective circles, and we didn't spend as much time together in the later years of that middle and high school that we went to together, and we kind of drifted outta touch. And it was actually on Facebook that same fall of 2016 when I was beginning to think really seriously about these questions, that he reached out really unexpectedly on Facebook and friended me and said, "Don't laugh at my politics LOL."

And my whole family moved to Los Angeles on a sabbatical that my wife and I both had in 2017, which, and he was still living there. He's now a lawyer and has a family of his own and a very successful legal practice. We began spending more time together and talking and arguing, in fact, about where things were going in the country. It was really interesting because the very coordinates of what we each thought was significant, what counted as news, what felt important, what felt worth talking about or taking seriously were so fundamentally different, and it had everything to do with where we got our news, our sense of the world. One of the things that I learned and I write about in the book is the way in which each of us began to listen to very different radio stations, even in those middle school and high school years. Armen actually began listening to conservative talk radio at a pretty young age. He was a big Rush Limbaugh fan, and he found that it resonated for him, in part because there was a, the, you know, there were sort of prevailing ideas around politics at the school that we all went to that didn't sit entirely well with him, and so he found this other show validating, and, and he, he kind of became, like, a big fan.

Julie Rose: And what's, if I could just interrupt for a second, Anand, because, the two of you actually had quite a bit in common, at least, um, you were, you both had had an immigrant background, immigrant culture, also, um, some shared interests, like, you were, you were alike in a lot of ways, kind of starting from a similar place and then, and then to sort of see how you ended up, you know, like, on very different ends of the, of the, the political spectrum and trying to kind of deconstruct, like, how did that happen, right?

Anand Pandian: Yeah, well, I, I think a lot of it has to do with the different bubbles that we wind up falling into. Certainly in this case, media had a lot to do with it. But the other thing that I also argue, what I spend a lot of time trying to suggest in the book is that it isn't enough to simply talk about these ideological bubbles. It isn't enough to simply lament the fact that we no longer share common sense of reality, because those divides are actually anchored in some very real and serious ways in the infrastructure of our daily lives, that it matters that when people listen, for example, to talk radio, they do it so often in a private automobile, which is already an isolated space in the world, which is so often a space that people occupy on their own as individuals, on their way to work and back. That is to say there's a relationship between the isolating nature of that environment that represents the way that we spend so much of our time outside our homes these days, and the isolating nature of that discourse that people often take in in those spaces. And then when you come back home, if you live in a neighborhood where, say for example, you get in and out of your house through your garage rather than your front door, where you walk into the house and you know you spend your time inside, or if you're hanging out friends, you do it on the back deck instead of on the front porch, such that you've completely lost an everyday culture of seeing strangers, of interacting with people that you don't know. All of these different dimensions can actually feed on each other, and I would say intensify those, those experiences not only of isolation, but also, to the point of your podcast, of discomfort with ideas that are unfamiliar, with people that are unfamiliar, with stories that don't quite sit well with how you've come to live. All of these different dimensions of our daily lives have created almost a kind of infrastructure of discomfort with difference itself that I think has a lot to do with these social and political impasses that we find ourselves in now.

Julie Rose: And because it's an infrastructure, that, that suggests to me that, that we can't expect for these encounters to happen naturally, that the, the roads are built, the walls are made quite impermeably, and the only way that we, if we desire to kind of break through some of that is we have to make very intentional choices.

Anand Pandian: We have to make intentional choices, yes, and in some ways the book grows out of certain intentional choices that I was able to make as an individual, as an anthropologist, spending time with people I don't know, being in places, uh, that I'm unfamiliar with, trying to learn how to tell stories about ways of being in the world that are very unfamiliar to me. On the other hand, the book itself isn't ultimately, I would say, a completely gloomy story. Because the other side of all this, that I also spend a lot of time with, and I think it's important to convey in this conversation as well, is that as long as we've had these forces of isolation, division, and let's use this word too, segregation, at work in the United States, these lines between lives that matter, say, and lives that don't, we've also had people organizing against those dynamics, people building other ways of being together with each other in order to develop alternative forms of collective possibility, often for minoritized or marginalized communities who have no way of really eking out a living in a society that is so often as segregated and unequal as ours, except by leaning into those relationships.

And part of what I also try to show is that those social possibilities remain with us. I tell the story of organizers working to desegregate a north Texas town and the way in which literally generations of this kind of work continue to inflect the forms of collective organizing that people are engaged in today. I tell the story of a climate activist named Mark Baumer, who made a really difficult decision to walk barefoot across the country along highway shoulders to protest climate change, the untimely demise that he met to be sure in exposing himself in such a radical and difficult way, but at the same time, all the work in pedestrian safety and in creating roadways habitable for all kinds of living beings that the work of people like his has inspired. I tell the story of feminist activists in Columbus, Ohio who coined the slogan, "Shed Walls. Don't Build Them," and built a successful movement to abolish the Pink Tax on menstrual products in a Republican state whose largely male lawmakers were at first so uncomfortable with the very topic that they didn't even wanna make eye contact with people who had brought that issue into the State House, and yet they got this work done by building unexpected forms of alliance and solidarity with people across the aisle and built a different kind of common sense that was ultimately politically efficacious. So, you see these forms of possibility that have long been with us in this country and that continue to be, be with us, and in my mind represent ways of working effectively beyond those divides that I narrate, and part of what I'm arguing is that we have a lot to learn from those ventures as well.

Julie Rose: The book is called "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down." It's written by Anand Pandian, who's a professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Pandian, thank you so much for your time today.

Anand Pandian: Thank you so much, Julie. It was really such a honor to, to speak with you about the book.

Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. What do you think about this idea of building up and tearing down the walls in our lives? I'd love to hear your story. Email uncomfy@byu.edu or connect with us on social media. Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Hyobin Kim and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.