Can We Build a World Where We All Belong?

The youngest of nine children, john a. powell (who doesn’t use capital letters in his name) was born in the 1950s in Detroit to a loving Black family, where community, belonging, and church ran deep.

But, at age 11, he fell out with his family and church, and this led to him feeling disconnected and “othered” by those closest to him. Years of rupture and repair with his family offered deep lessons that led him to become an expert in bridging differences. Today, powell is professor of African American studies and ethnic studies at the UC Berkeley Law School, and director of the university’s Othering & Belonging Institute.

In his latest book, The Power of Bridging (edited and developed with Rachelle Galloway-Popotas), powell authentically weaves his personal story and decades of research into this easy-to-follow guide for building a world where no group or person has the right to dominate another.

In the U.S., 93% of people want to reduce divisiveness, and 86% believe it’s possible to disagree in a healthy way. But many of us don’t know how to move past our differences. The Power of Bridging breaks down four key terms: bridging, belonging, othering, and breaking. In the book, powell explains what it means to truly belong or feel connected to oneself and to people, and what it feels like when we engage in breaking, or denying the full stories, complexities, or humanity of those we consider “other.” He explains the “other” as people we see as different, less deserving, and not of equal dignity as us.

We sat down with powell to talk about The Power of Bridging.

Sahar Habib Ghazi: How do you define “bridging”?

john a. powell: One way of thinking about bridging is if there’s a divide of some kind, what do we do about that?

One approach is to try to persuade the person to come to your side. Another is to avoid the person. Bridging is neither of those. Bridging is saying, I want to connect with the other person. Bridging is saying, I’m curious. Bridging involves connecting at the heart level, as well as the head level. So it’s really being present with someone.

There’s a South African word called Sawubona, which means, I see you. The word is also sometimes interpreted as the God in me, sees the God in you. Bridging is seeing the other person. So it doesn’t mean you agree with the person. Doesn’t mean you change your mind or they change your mind. But you see their humanity, you see their value, and you’re resolutely willing to open up and just listen, empathetic listening, compassionate listening.

SHG: In the book, you use your own story to explain bridging as you see it. You write, “As a child, I very seldom had contact with any people who weren’t Black.” Why was it important for you to tell your story?

jap: I’ve written a number of books. Some of them are more academic. They’re strong analytically, but they’re not always accessible to people. We all have stories. Our life is made up of stories, and we tell stories to ourselves and to others. Also, I feel like I have a fabulous family, so it’s nice to share my family with others.

But even though I have this fabulous family, we had a break, and I think that’s true in a lot of families. So saying you have a wonderful family, a wonderful relationship, doesn’t mean you won’t have issues. And I felt like the book also shares a way of coming back together.

Sometimes we’re too binary; things are good, or things are bad. But life is actually both good and bad. It’s constant. And we participate in it. And so, to some extent, it was a delight for me to write about my family and share our wonderful journey.

SHG: I hadn’t heard of “breaking” before reading your book. You write, “When we engage in breaking, we deny the full stories, complexities, and even sometimes the humanity of those we consider the other. Their suffering does not count as much as ours.” Why is it important to understand breaking to understand othering?

jap: Well, breaking is one of the mechanisms we use to “other.” We live in a world now that’s deeply fractured at every level—personal, institutional, structural, national, international.

And some people think that’s inevitable. They think that you naturally gravitate toward people who are like yourself, and not to people who are not like yourself. So we might not be familiar with the term, but we are familiar with the practice.

I’ve talked about a homeless person in the book. Most people aren’t curious about that person. When you break with someone, oftentimes they become two-dimensional. If that person is homeless, we don’t ask questions like: What kind of vegetables do they like? Do they have children? Did they have a favorite dog? What are they afraid of?

So when we break with someone, we actually break with their humanity. They become a caricature, Democrat, Republic, Muslim, or Christian. But who are they in their multiplicity? Breaking literally breaks our relationship with each other and diminishes the other person or the other group to a caricature. 

SHG: Your book seems to be a guide not to just bridging with others, but bridging with our own complexities and nuances. You write, “We cannot heal without bridging.” What are the biggest internal challenges we face in terms of bridging?

jap: One of the things that accelerates breaking is fear. Fear is curated by what we call conflict entrepreneurs. These people tell us stories that the world can be messy, the world can be hard, and the world is changing, and those stories are driving a lot of anxiety in the world.

Here in the United States, there are two major stories about that. One is that the world is scary, and it’s somebody’s fault. It’s the gay people’s fault or the Muslims’ fault or immigrants’ fault. Those are breaking stories.

Another story that’s not breaking is: Yes, the world is messy, yes, it is changing, I don’t know what the future will bring, but it’s brought us together, and if we can connect with each other, if we can see each other, if we can be grounded in the Earth, we’re probably gonna be OK.

So, to me, that’s the beauty of bridging. It actually deals with fear. And the other thing that’s important and tricky is that the brain is complicated. There’s a part of the brain that is rational, the prefrontal cortex, and another part of the brain that is less rational. That’s organized around fear and flight. We call that the lizard brain. When we’re very excited or when we’re very tense, the lizard brain takes over. And the lizard brain doesn’t like facts. It doesn’t read research papers. It organizes around fear and what it does relate to is stories.

And so part of the challenge around bridging is to learn to tell stories, to learn to bridge with the lizard brain.

SHG: Your book is grounded in current affairs. You mention Trump, Biden, and Obama. And you also talk about recent research that shows white men score lower than Black people on belonging. Why was that important?

jap: In our society, we think about dominant groups. Some groups have a lot of voice, they have more wealth, they are seen as belonging more than others. When you think about the United States and the Constitution, we the people, well, they weren’t talking about me. When they say we, I as a Black man wasn’t included in that. They weren’t even talking about women. They were talking about this very narrow group. We think about that group as being really in control. That group is the gold standard, which everybody wants to reach.

And so it’s important to understand that everybody, including the group—in this case, white men—are feeling othered.  When we have cracks in the containers, cracks in our institutions, cracks in our trust systems, we have nothing to stand on. And it affects everybody, but not the same. People are not situated the same, but it affects everybody.

One of the ways it affects many white men, and white men is a broad category, is their loss of status. Some groups who are marginal, they never had that status, so they don’t mourn the loss of it. White men who are used to being in control, used to dominating, they actually suffer all the things that others may suffer, but they also suffer the loss of status. These election results indicate that some are trying to regain that status at someone else’s expense.

SHG: You end each chapter with nuanced reflective questions, such as, “What aspects of your identity align with dominant groups?” and “What social issues give you anxiety?” Why were these questions important?

jap: I’m trying to try to make this book an invitation. I don’t have all the answers. No one does. But many of us will reflect on the fact that we have our own breaking stories, we have our own belonging stories, we have our own stories of suffering, of being in a place where we didn’t belong. So, part of it is inviting people to participate. It’s like, I share with you what I’ve been going through, what are you going through? We need to share that with each other. We need to actually anchor ourselves in that suffering, but not in a way that closes us off from others—in a way that opens us up to other people’s suffering, as well. It’s not a passive book in that sense. It’s not just something you’re reading. Hopefully. It’s something that engenders thinking and engenders examination and engenders action. So those are the questions I designed to try to help at that.

SHG: Kamala was bridging with Republicans during the election, Trump was engaging in othering. He won, she didn’t. What does that mean, in your opinion?

jap: I have a lot of concerns, beyond breaking and bridging. When I read the newspaper and read about the United States planning on deporting up to 11 million people, some of them U.S. citizens, I think of the pain and the suffering that will inflict on those people in the country itself. I’m concerned that essentially half the country thinks that’s OK. And maybe not, maybe they voted for Trump and they don’t think that’s OK—but at least he was not hiding the fact that he was planning on doing that. He’s weaponized the other, and so he says the “bad Mexicans.” All the data suggests that Mexicans don’t commit any more crime than anyone else, undocumented or not. But that story he’s activating is hatred. And he has the instrumentality of the entire government behind him, the military, the police, and he has the public. He is speaking to fear, but not in a way to quiet it down, but to blame somebody else, and that can quickly turn into violence. We’ve seen that before. It’s not an exaggeration to say, this is how it happened in Germany in the 1930s. So that concerns me.

But I think there’s a silver lining. A lot of othering is really about belonging. People want to belong, but it gets twisted. We’re told, in order to belong, those people can’t belong. In order to belong, you gotta attack those people. We use othering as a mechanism to try to create belonging. And that’s the mistake we made more than once. At the root of it is a deep need and yearning for belonging. We need to actually lean into that yearning. Need to talk about that yearning. We don’t need to be in control. We need to connect with each other.

SHG: You write about bridging as a possibility, choice, and practice. What signals are you reading for hope right now?

jap: It depends on how you define hope. Some people think of hope as the willingness to continue to act in the face of adversity. If that’s hope, then I have hope.

But if it’s a feeling, if it’s just what I call nostalgia for the future, I don’t really organize around hope. Unfortunately, many people who organize around hope, also organize around despair. In between the two, hope is much better and more important, because despair becomes self-fulfilling. If you withdraw, if you stop engaging, then the forces that you’re concerned about become even more powerful.

I have a plaque in my house that says: I’m not an optimist, nor I’m a pessimist. I’m a possibilist. I believe what we do matters. We don’t know how things are going to turn out, but we know our engagement counts for something. I certainly have been feeling the weight of this election and what it may mean for the country or marginalized people, for the Earth itself; that concerns me. But I feel like what we can do, what we must do, is to be engaged without knowing, without having guarantees, of the outcome.