An Anthropologist on the Everyday Walls of American Life - And How to Tear Them Down
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Brad Onishi sits down with Dr. Anand Pandian, author of Something Between Us, to explore the everyday “walls” that divide Americans—from SUVs and suburbs to video doorbells and noise-canceling headphones. Drawing on James Baldwin’s influence, Pandian reveals how our built environments and habits foster suspicion, loneliness, and disconnection. They exacertabe the ruthlessness of our political age.
Onishi and Pandian discuss how activism, like the “Aunt Flow” movement, and simple neighborly acts can help rebuild empathy and community. This episode is a powerful reminder that polarization isn’t just political—it’s personal, physical, and fixable.
Anand Pandian's book: https://anand.studio
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We live in a polarized society.
We live in a time where we are suspicious of our neighbors, not sure of their politics, not sure of their intentions.
We live in a time when it's hard to make friends in real life, when our interactions with people in the physical world have diminished and given way to social media, to Netflix, to all the ways that we can silo ourselves off away from other people.
Today I speak to Anand Pondian, Krieger Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
We talk about his new book, Something Between Us, the Everyday Walls in American Life and How to Tear Them Down.
He crisscrossed the country to discuss politics and culture with people he disagreed with.
The son of South Asian immigrants and an anthropologist, Panian brings a sensitive ear to these issues, but an unflinching look at what it will take to overcome them.
Our conversation centers on the ways that our built environment, like the very walls and cities and streets, our front porches, our air-conditioned houses, our huge SUVs and trucks, these divide us as much as the social media silos and media landscapes we're so used to discussing.
What I took away from this conversation was something I hope you do too, and that was hope.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
It's great to be with you on this Monday.
And today I welcome a first-time guest who I am truly, truly thrilled to speak to.
And that is Dr. Anand Pandian, who's written a great book, Something Between Us, The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down.
Anand, thank you for joining me.
Thank you so much, Brad.
It really is a pleasure to be able to talk with you about this new book of mine.
I'm so excited because this is a book that it does two things at once.
It takes an unflinching look at, I think, the things that separate us in our society today.
There's no looking away from that.
There's no trying to say, hey, it's not as bad as you think, or don't worry, we're actually fine.
But it also provides really insightful ways to not only think about that polarization and division, but to overcome it, to ameliorate it, to try to break down some barriers.
So I can't wait to share that with folks.
I got to start with the title, though, because it's just beautiful.
So the title is something between us, and it really comes, or at least is inspired by James Baldwin.
So give us insight.
How does a James Baldwin quote about the United States inspire this title?
Yeah, thank you so much for your interest in this project, Brad.
And the title itself has everything to do with what you were talking about a second ago with regard to the two sides of this book project.
I really did set out in 2016 as an anthropologist to try to make sense of this national predicament of ours, these impasse, just the impossibility of talking to each other anymore across these lines that have gotten so deep and so severe.
But also where we can go from here, what we can do and what we might learn in particular from people who have been doing that work, who have been organizing and mobilizing and thinking and talking and working across those divides in effective and sometimes quite inspiring ways.
And those are the two sides of the book.
Those are the two angles that orient the different stories that I tell drawing on travels around the United States over the last eight years.
And the title very much tries to reflect that.
It comes from a phrase that James Baldwin used in his famous debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University, in which he was speaking about the experience of being a black man from the United States outside of the United States in Europe, seeing the disdain with which white Americans would meet him and try to sort of disavow the fact that they'd come from the same place.
And yet, as Baldwin says, there's something between us.
They are my countrymen and we do have something in common.
And to me, those three words, something between us, speak both to the sense of a barrier, of something that rises up between people that makes it impossible for them to connect, but Also,
indeed, about the reality of that relationship, the fact that there is a connection that can't be denied, and the challenge of working our way back to an understanding and acceptance of that underlying relationship.
Baldwin says this.
He says, these are my countrymen, and I do care about them.
And even if I didn't, even if I didn't care about them, there is something between us.
And as I read your book and I read the quote, I thought about there's so many folks who from 2016 to now have arrived at a place where they're so angry at people who they feel like have gone down a path politically that has dehumanized neighbors, that is supporting things like concentration camps, that is supporting things like inhumane practices around deportation and so many other things.
And it's, you get to this point, and I've heard it from a lot of people that say, I don't, I've given up on those people.
I don't care anymore.
And Baldwin says, as you just elaborated, says something so brilliant.
It's like, these are my countrymen and I do care about them.
And even if I didn't, there is something between us.
And that something between us is really the subject of your book.
One of the most stunning insights of the book comes right at the beginning where you talk about the common knowledge these days is that we're in silos, we're in media silos, we are cordoned off from people who disagree with us.
And I think some of that is largely on point.
But you say on page three, we need to pay more attention instead to the everyday walls and divides that Americans have come to rely on in their daily lives, that there are both mental distinctions, but also built environment distinctions that separate us.
How does that work?
You know, because to me, this was an incisive addition to a very common knowledge idea that, oh, we just live in silos and you're on your Facebook and I'm on my blue sky.
And that's just how it works today.
One of the key arguments of this book is that the silos aren't just metaphors.
They're real.
It isn't that things like social media and our information ecosystems just put us into different domains of imagination and thinking as though we occupy different realities.
All that is happening and it's deeply troubling and it makes finding our way back to some kind of common ground or common sense about what to do about some of these most serious issues that we confront right now, whether it's climate change or the refugee crisis or the question of how to deal with a variety of social issues with the humanity that those issues deserve.
When we think about the challenge of affordable housing or affordable medical care or the needs of those who come often from circumstances of great deprivation and desperation when they come as immigrants or refugees to the United States,
all of those issues require us to be able to work together in a constructive manner to devise solutions that reflect our humanity as well as the aspirations that we talk about so often.
We speak of the United States.
And yet, clearly, it is so difficult.
And I'm trying to make sense of why these difficulties have the tenacity that they do.
And when I set out in 2016 to try to make sense of this as an anthropologist, as someone whose way of working, whose way of doing research involves immersing myself in different situations, talking to people, examining their circumstances of everyday life, their habits, who they hang out with and who they relate to and how.
As I paid attention as an anthropologist to those details of American life as we have it now, really began to see, as I was saying earlier, that these silos are really everywhere.
They're built into the infrastructure of our daily lives as Americans.
They're reflected in the increasingly fortress-like homes that so many people live in, the gated and walled communities that so many Americans rely on now for their sense of safety and security, the massive armored vehicles that we drive in the name,
again, of safety and security on the road, but which are so intimidating and so out of scale when it comes to the needs of an urban community, not just with drivers, but also with walkers and cyclists and children and all those other more vulnerable roadway users who share those streets with those massive vehicles.
It's reflected in the way that we think of our own bodies as fortresses that need to be defended from others with whom we don't share very much at all by way of our shared commitment to our mutual health and well-being.
And of course, yes, it's reflected in these walls of the mind that you were speaking of as well.
All of these different dimensions actually ramify in each other, I try to show in the book, and make it all the more difficult to find that sense of common ground, of common identity, of common understanding.
It seems that our FaceTime with others in our community has gone way down.
And I'm talking as someone, and just be fully transparent here.
I spend most of my days working at home.
I take my kids to daycare.
I drop them off.
I might talk to a parent or two there.
Go home.
Work in front of a screen.
And the need to be in my community is sometimes on an everyday basis, one that I have to intentionally exercise because otherwise I might just be at home staring at a screen for work and then staring at a screen after work when I watch TV.
You talk about how American homes have changed.
Our interactions with our neighbors have changed.
Gone are the days of sitting on a front porch.
Gone are the days for many people of multi-generational living or of, you know, being around neighbors because of, you know, kind of a civic participation that fills in an individual need.
We can stay at home in the air conditioning.
We can watch any number of streaming services, endless, endless content to keep us busy at night.
And the idea of going into public and actually talking to people really seems more scary than anything to a lot of people.
What are some of the changes that have been built into the environment that really contribute to everything I think you just talked about with the separation and the walls?
You've begun to talk about these dimensions, Brad, and I really appreciate your drawing some of these elements out of the books.
Something so simple we might think about as the great prevalence now of video doorbells and the way that they've come to substitute for the simple act of coming to the door when you hear a knock and opening that door and engaging perhaps with a stranger.
Sometimes in ways that we don't want to engage.
You don't know who's going to show up at that front door.
And this is partly what devices like this are playing on, this sense of skepticism or unease or mistrust or suspicion that we might carry into those unexpected interactions with people that we don't know.
And yet, I think the reality is the less we do that, the higher the stakes go in terms of actually doing it at some other time.
That is to say, the less contact we have with people we don't know that well, the more intimidating and unsettling that can become.
And so really, when we talk about the increasingly isolated nature of our lives in this country, we're talking about two separate kinds of things.
One is the question of whether we see anyone at all, which is, I think, something you were talking about, the way in which these different bubbles or sort of cocoons that we can retreat into can leave us in a situation where we're really not necessarily interacting with anyone.
Instead of going out to eat, you just order takeout and someone brings it and drops it off at your door.
There are ever so many ways in which you could see a simple substitution for the very possibility of interacting with others.
But there's another dimension to it, which is also the interaction with people that we don't know that well, with our neighbors, with the people that we live alongside, with strangers, with others on an everyday basis that we can imagine sharing our neighborhoods and streets and communities with,
but also on a larger, more abstract scale, the others who are unlike us, who we also share this country with, people who come from other countries, people who speak other languages, people who have other faiths, people who have other ways of seeing the world and seeing their place in the world.
The argument that I make in the book is that the less of that kind of exposure on an everyday basis that we have to foreignness and difference, the harder it is for us to assimilate and accept the possibility that we need to in fact share the space of this country with others who are often rather unlike us.
Yeah.
I'm going to give you a story in three parts, and I hope it makes sense.
I moved back to California five, six years ago, and for the most part, I lived in downtown San Jose.
And San Jose is known to be kind of the hub of Silicon Valley, but historically San Jose has been a working-class place that has not been full of riches and Bay Area affluence.
It's been a lot of people when I was growing up looked at San Jose as the fifth borough, the Staten Island of the Bay Area.
And when I lived in downtown San Jose, there were still people, if you ran into the kind of the wrong person, they'd say, oh, you live downtown.
Is it safe?
Is that okay?
And my experience living in downtown San Jose was one of absolute cultural richness.
I knew my neighbors because our houses were so close to each other and also because we just needed each other.
There was, you know, the space was so tight that oftentimes we would need to help each other move or we'd need to go over and say, hey, I'm going to be doing something later.
It might be a little loud.
Are you good?
I had a neighbor who had a heart attack on her porch and I heard her and I went over and like helped her.
I looked everyone in the face in my neighborhood at the donut shop, at the park.
There was taquerias that would pop up on the corner and we would just go sit with our neighbors and eat tacos together.
And I felt so rich in that neighborhood.
We then moved.
We had kids.
We needed a bigger house and we moved to a suburb.
And I had not lived in a suburb in a long, long time.
And this was a place that if you had asked others, people would be like, oh, nice neighborhood or, oh, that's a nice place to live.
And the neighbors on either side of me, I lived there for two years.
One of them I saw every day getting in and out of their house.
And they, I am not exaggerating.
I'm not saying this just for a good story on the podcast.
Said zero words to me in two years.
And there were multiple times of me sort of looking over, trying to like awkwardly wave like, hey, you've lived here a lot longer than me.
I'm trying to.
And what I, what I concluded from that is that suburban setting was one where everybody was pretending they lived in a kingdom that was self-sufficient.
You didn't need anyone.
You actually wanted to pretend no one else was around.
And if they actually bumped up against you in the neighborhood, like for some reason, you like were actually entangled, it was an inconvenience.
It was like, I pay to live here and not have to like be entangled with other humans.
That's the goal.
The third part of the story is I've just recently moved to a smaller town in another, a small town in another part of the country.
And in the short time I've been here, the FaceTime I have had with people in the small town is far surpassed anything from before because I take my kids, we go to the small town, we go to the farmer's market, we go to the First Friday event, we go to the, and we, we talk to people we don't know and they want to talk to us.
And as I read your book, I just thought, this is so great, at least for now, the experience I'm having, but it's got to be so rare in this country anymore.
The idea that you would walk to the barbershop, the idea that you would go into town and see the local hardware person and say, hey, what hose should I buy?
That's gone.
And therefore, many of the interactions are gone.
I apologize for that three-part story, but as I got into your book, it just, I couldn't get away from that if it lands for you in any sense.
You're absolutely right to pull up examples like this because I think those occasions matter a great deal.
We might just experience these things as the sort of background of our lives.
These might just be the spaces that we hardly pay attention to as we do the things that are meaningful to us, running that errand, going to that doctor's appointment, dropping off the mail or getting your groceries or your food or whatever.
But I really do feel that these things that can happen incidentally on the margins of our lives can have a great deal of significance with regard to our imagination of the proper social texture of our communities.
And what you were saying actually resonates with me a great deal because in some ways I made almost the reverse move in that I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles.
It was oriented very much around automobiles.
The streets were absurdly wide.
We came in and out of the garage rather than the front door.
The front door was almost a sort of ornamental appendage.
It wasn't the real aperture of the home.
We hardly interacted with our neighbors.
We were hardly on the street, aside from occasions where we'd walk the dog or run or walk occasionally.
The life of that suburb wasn't very oriented toward any form of possible community on those streets and hardly know anyone in that neighborhood where I grew up.
On the other hand, I'm really lucky to say that I live now and have lived for nearly 20 years now in a neighborhood in Baltimore that feels very much like a neighborhood, that feels like some of those spaces that you describe where we are able to walk to all kinds of things,
to the hardware store, to restaurants nearby, to cafes, to our dentist, to work in my case, where people are not only engaging with each other on an everyday basis, saying hello, just acknowledging even strangers walking by on the sidewalks, but also looking out for each other, I think, in ways that are really important, that speak to the potential I think we still have in this country for a certain kind of neighborliness.
One of the stories I tell in the book is about a morning a couple days after the election last fall when I had, I think, just sort of left one of the lights on in our car overnight.
I think I'd just been up too late watching the news and trying to just absorb where we'd gotten and get to the car.
It won't start.
And we're trying to figure out what to do in terms of dropping the kids off at school.
And just then a neighbor of ours walked by, not someone that I even recognized or knew by name really at all, but he noticed that we had this problem.
He offered to give us a jump, which was something that we gladly took him up on.
We got the car started and we went on with our day.
But what I say is that so many elements had to be in place for that interaction to work the way it did.
He had to be walking up the street instead of in a vehicle himself.
He had to be coming along that sidewalk and seeing us and feeling that inclination to actually stop and help out when he saw that we needed something.
He had to be doing it without a pair of headphones on his ears so that he could actually hear and notice that there was something going on that we could use some help with.
So these isolating walls that we're talking about span the gamut, really, from the physical walls of our homes and structures and so on to even very small, apparently innocuous, yet highly consequential devices like headphones, which can put us in a very different space, even as we're in physical proximity with others.
So just very quickly, I've noticed this in the classroom.
So when I started full-time teaching 10, 12, 14 years ago, one of the ways that I would make my classroom into a community is I would get there early.
I would get to class 10 minutes early and kids start to trickle in.
And you say, and I taught at liberal arts colleges.
So you got eight kids, 12 kids, 15 kids in a class.
So, hey, James, how are you?
How did the lacrosse thing go last?
You're on the lacrosse team.
How did that go?
What's going on with that?
Hey, hey, Annabelle, like, you know, you went to like visit home last week.
How was it?
Was it a good time?
And this was a way for me to sort of make a connection with students, for them to realize I knew who they were.
I cared about the things they shared in class about their lives and their backgrounds, et cetera.
And it was a way too for other students to ask each other things.
Oh, did you go to the thing last night?
Or you're in that club.
I'm in that one too.
And now, I don't know if you have this experience, and I know every university is different, but you get there 10 minutes early and every student has their phone out and headphones on.
And if you try to be like, hey, yo, Jennifer, how'd the thing go?
Or like, hey, Michael, what, what happened with this?
Or they look at you like, what are you doing?
Like, why are you being creepy?
Like, what?
Class has not started.
You don't talk to me right now and I don't talk to you.
Like, this is, we don't have to have interactions.
I'm doing my thing on my phone with my headphones in and you're all over here being cringy and like trying to talk to me.
Like, and they don't talk to each other either.
It's not like anyone else is talking to each other.
It's not like I'm just a weird professor.
They don't talk to each other either.
That's another symptom of this, at least in my mind.
Yeah, it's a really interesting point.
And I think about a moment maybe a few years ago when, not a moment, but there was a there was a period of time some years ago when I used to, not only me, but all of us at my university had clauses on our class syllabi that described our electronics policy.
Yes.
You know, you can't have devices open, you can't have devices on.
You got to be, you know, zero, you got to be sort of locked in in terms of the conversations that we're having.
You've got to be focused if you're taking notes, do it in a notebook, all this kind of stuff.
It's so quaint, isn't it?
It's thinking back on it.
It's really funny to think about because there is no classroom without all these devices.
And it really does have consequences once again, because you, you know, I know it as a professor.
I can be in a really small seminar room where nominally we're all sharing a space together and yet everyone's in their own universe by virtue of the device that they're tied to at that moment.
It's really interesting.
One of the things that I learned in doing this research has to do with the intergenerational dimension of some of these dynamics that I talk about in the book.
If you take, for example, these concerns around safety and security and the way in which the pursuit of safety and security in the United States is so often on highly individualized terms,
whether it's the shell of that automobile that takes you to work or the space of individual homes or any number of other devices that are designed to secure us as individuals, you think about what it takes to move toward a more collective sense of our well-being, of our safety and security and more shared and collective terms.
And you think about how that dimension may be changing over time.
One of the most interesting and in some ways unsettling things that I came to understand is that the commitment to securing oneself, to gaining distance from the world as a way of protecting oneself, isn't simply and straightforwardly something that you see among,
say, middle-aged folks and older folks, people who maybe have a little more property, people who have anxieties about the way the world is changing.
You might make certain assumptions about the likelihood that the greatest commitment to, say, household security devices might lie with people, say, who are boomers and so on.
And yet, it turns out that millennials and younger people have a great deal of investment in these security technologies, in these home surveillance technologies.
That this isn't a way, these suspicions aren't, in a sense, something that we're growing out of, but something that we might in fact be growing into.
And when we think about why that's the case, we think about how it is that people, why it is that people experience proximity to others with the degree of unease that it often seems to carry, I think we have to take some of these technologies seriously.
Things that promise to give us space, promise to give us a sense of personal well-being, but are structured in such a manner that they actually make us more uneasy in the company of others and force us to retreat ever further.
I see that in young people and I see that in folks who perceive the world, and I think in many ways, rightly, as one full of threats.
You know, when I think of young college students now, I think of the pressure on them, the anxieties of living in a world where things are only going to get worse.
The climate crisis, they've only been alive during a decade of political uncertainty.
And so I think, you know, what we need to do is turn our conversation towards, well, what do we do about this?
I think everyone listening is going to say, yeah, you know, you're right about the ways we're siloed, not only on social media and other ways, but also in our built environments.
You say on page 181, knowing there are people instead of monsters on the other side doesn't tell us anything about how to live with them.
And I think the first part is really key.
There are some monsters out there, and I don't take that lightly.
There are some people who are intentionally hurtful and malicious towards others.
Yes.
And I document those on this show all the time.
There's a lot of people who have written to me over the years that have said, I love my parents, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin, my friend, my colleague.
And they've gone down a road I can't believe.
And you document these in your book, childhood friends, acquaintances, people you've known throughout the country.
So I think the first premise is, all right, not everyone's a monster, but everyone is vulnerable to monstrous ideas.
But then the second part is really the one I think people get stuck on.
Well, how do we live with them?
How do we live with each other?
How do you make that connection?
How do you break out of the walls, pierce the barriers and actually go explore and connect and invest in the people who live around you, the people in your community, the people anywhere?
Because I think there's a truly epidemic of loneliness and isolation in the world right now.
You give so many insights in the book about this.
What are a couple you can share with us today?
Yeah, it's such an important question.
In so it's it is.
It is the question of our time because the reality is that we share a country with people we often don't agree with.
We share a planet with ever so many people whose well-being is so deeply tied up with ours, even if we don't want to admit it, even if we don't want to acknowledge that our faiths are in fact hitched together.
The truth is, they are.
And so all those threats that are very real, that young people in particular feel so keenly are issues that we can only address effectively through collective action,
Through collective commitment, through the kinds of relationships, coalitions, alliances that grow out of a willingness to find common purpose and the ability to make effective change across these lines of difference that we've been talking about.
How do you do that?
It's a real challenge, especially when, as you say, so many of the ideas that we see afloat in our media sphere these days do feel monstrous.
You know, it reminds me of an encounter I had or a series of encounters I had with a conservative cartoonist based in Augusta, Georgia, who was responsible for a kind of anti-immigrant cartoon that I found really disturbing when I first saw it a few years ago.
It was a cartoon that he had made in 2014 when there was a lot of press about migrant children coming across, unaccompanied migrant children coming across the southern border of the United States.
And there were false stories that were spread about the diseases they're most likely carrying.
And there's this notion that these children could be vectors of disease.
And this cartoonist brought that concern home in a way that felt really troubling to me in that it seemed to imply that the children were almost like living, walking, talking embodiments of disease.
And I reached out to him with the hopes of meeting him and having a conversation.
And even meeting was a bit of a challenge in that at the same time, of all people, Sasha Baron Cohen was traveling around the country doing, having encounters, fake encounters for a show of his about the United States, which you may have seen.
And he was putting on a number of different alter egos.
And one of them was a, I can't remember the name of the figure, but he was pretending to be someone, a liberal, traveling around the country for a show called Bridging the Divide, in which he would talk to conservatives, which is a, you know, a sort of endeavor that was weirdly similar to what I was doing and made me think, all right, like, what am I actually doing here anyway?
And what is the point of all this?
And is this all just laughable?
But when I went to Augusta, one of the first things I had to do was to convince this cartoonist that I wasn't Sasha Baron Cohen actually pranking him.
Yeah.
But we got through that and we met and he wound up being like really engaging and really interesting to talk to.
And we had really a whole series of debates over the course of a few days that year.
I think that was in 2016, 2018.
We kept in touch over the years.
We kept in touch.
We kept in touch through the years of the pandemic, in fact, when he felt that when he felt that some of his own concerns around disease were borne out by what was happening at that time.
But interestingly, where he also felt that the Republican Party had itself betrayed some of the commitments that it had held to in earlier years.
And so in the years of our interaction, his own political allegiances changed.
And he wound up with very different ideas, actually, about immigration, about the relationship between our welfare in the United States and the welfare of other people in Central and South America, which I write about in the book.
And like many other people, he wound up feeling like a bit of an outlier in the contemporary Republican Party.
And that's one of the things that I found really interesting about this research that people that I met, so many of the people that I met and began to talk to in the year, you know, 2016, in 2017, have actually changed their positions, have changed their identifications.
Some of them have even described a sense of feeling politically homeless at this point because they don't feel that the existing party structures really match what they're looking for and what they need.
And I think that's true on the left as well as on the right.
And I think that that's actually one thing that's really important.
I think it's very easy to imagine that all of us are necessarily bunkered into these silos.
We're never going to change our minds, but I found it happening again and again.
And that's part of what I chronicle in this book.
The key really is to figure out how to move from these isolated cases where people are changing their minds or looking again and talking again about what they'd like to see.
How do you move from that to more organized collective action to address some of these more basic and difficult issues that I mentioned earlier?
Well, let's talk about one of those that is in chapter 12, and that's the organization called Shedding Walls.
And this is, you know, you write with such creativity and you weave threads together.
And so Shedding Walls is the organization.
This is, of course, much different than Building a Wall.
One of their slogans is, you shed a wall, don't build a wall.
And this goes to everything that you're writing about.
Shedding Walls is a group of menstruation activists who are basically trying to make it such that period products and related things are available for free, just like toilet paper would be, et cetera.
But there's an interesting dynamic there with the founder and her dad that I think illustrates maybe some of what you're talking about, but it also illustrates the larger point that when you offer people a place to get involved with others and they kind of get out of their shell and they start to kind of participate, amazing how good it feels, amazing how many bonds are formed and amazing what it does for their well-being.
And don't get me wrong, I think we should be involved in activism to make the world better.
But I think what's often Overlooked is it often makes you better because it connects you to community, it connects you to others.
I think folks on the American right have figured that out a long time ago.
This is a way to get networked.
I think people in other spaces, and not to reduce things in ways that you just outlined to left or right, but often don't realize the social benefit and the personal benefit of actually just participating in something like collective action.
So tell us about Shedding Walls.
Tell us about Claire and her dad and everything that happened there.
Yeah, thank you so much.
One of the key arguments that I make in the book is that we have a lot to learn from organizers, from people organizing for racial justice, for environmental justice, for safe streets, for clean water, and indeed for gender justice or different dimensions of gender justice.
I spend time in different chapters of the book with activists and organizers who are building really on decades-long legacies of addressing these conditions of isolation, suspicion, segregation, and neglect through forms of collective organizing that have long promised a different picture of what this country could be and in fact should be.
And stories like that run throughout the book, and they give it, I would hope, a bit more of a hopeful texture than you might otherwise think with some of the difficulties that we've been talking about in this conversation.
And indeed, that final section of the book on what I call walls of the mind ends with this chapter called Shedding Walls.
It focuses on the work of a company called Ant Flow.
So that's the name of the company.
Ant Flow, a period products company that was organized or founded by menstrual equity activists who were working with the idea that no one who menstruates should find themselves in a condition where they don't have access to those products, those basic necessities in public places.
If you find toilet paper in any bathroom, hopefully where you wind up, why shouldn't you also find these products?
Really important question.
But also, folks who are trying to think about the larger challenge of organizing for gender justice, for reproductive rights, and how to do that effectively in some of the more conservative states in this country.
And so I write about a couple things in that chapter.
I write about the successful campaign to abolish the pink tax on menstrual products that young organizers in the state of Ohio, based primarily in Columbus, their successful campaign to abolish the pink tax in Ohio by building a political coalition between Democratic and Republican lawmakers,
getting this particular tax abolished in the same years that Ohio, like other more conservative states, was rolling back reproductive rights and what this might teach us about how to think through forms of political possibility and coalition building that we may not be as keyed into.
We think about some of the very difficult struggles that we have with regard to other issues.
But it is also zeroed in on this more personal story of this young woman, Claire Coder, who I met and spoke a lot with, who was one of the young women who coined this slogan that became one of the viral slogans of women's marches all over the world, really, in 2017.
Shed walls, don't build them.
A pun really on menstruation, but then directed toward the politics of immigration and wall building.
And one that put her in a really interesting relationship personally in that it reflected what you might think of as a liberal politics of acceptance and openness, but which sat at the same time uneasily with some of her own conservative roots.
And in particular, her relationship with her father, who, you know, as she says, and as I talk about in the book, sort of exposed her to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity morning and night, who, you know, who really, you know, who she tell the story of a moment when she came back from school one day with a pencil that her teacher had passed at pencil,
because her teacher had passed out pencils to all the kids in the class.
And her dad had taken one look at this pencil and said, F in handouts, you know, this click, even that was an embodiment of this handout culture that you might find liberals indulging in.
And that gives you some sense of his political coordinates.
And they were coordinates that she was sort of caught personally in herself.
But then interestingly and fascinatingly and really importantly, what I talk about in the book and what I try to show is that as she was doing this work, as she was launching this company, Ant Flow, that was working that was marketing period products, doing it in a way that would also commit to making these products available to people who couldn't afford them, her father also became a big fan and became really interested.
He put an Ant Flow bumper sticker on the back of his F-150 pickup truck.
He would spend time talking at work with other guys about how interesting and important this work was in a way that would make them uncomfortable, but he wasn't feeling that uncomfortable about himself.
He took this, the work of this company to his local conservative talk radio station and tried to get them to do a segment on it to which these folks said, well, you know, our audience really wouldn't be interested in a story like this.
