LORI LAKIN HUTCHERSON: You’ve dedicated
decades of your life to this cause of othering
and belonging, and I’m curious to understand
how you got to be doing this. I read that you’re
the son of sharecroppers, you’re one of nine.
And I’m wondering, are the seeds of belonging
there in being part of such a large family?JOHN A. POWELL: It’s an interesting question because it’s
not something I noticed, but I understood more and more
the role of narratives and stories. Not just externally but by
some counts we don’t have a coherent self until we have a
coherent story, an internal narrative. Internal narratives help
us constitute, to some extent, who we are to ourselves. But
those narratives are never really complete and they’re always
multiple. And to some extent even made up. I was having a
meeting with an environmental Buddhist activist named Joanna Macy. When we first met
she said, “So tell me your story.” And I said, “Be happy to. You know, we have many stories.”
And I said what I said to you. And she said, “Well, just pick one.”And I did. The reason this is important is that I think sometimes we believe too much in
our stories and somehow we believe we have a singular story. And that only distorts our
life in a certain way. It also can create a kind of rigidity. So sometimes our stories are also
performance. Right? I find especially with African Americans in the United States, and
relatively successful African Americans, there’s a story that you have it so bad. You know,
you didn’t have food to eat. You had to walk uphill 20 miles each direction going to school
through the snow and rain. And look at you now! That’s a somewhat attractive story.
And I feel like our society, particularly white society, elicit those stories. They like those
stories. When I went to college I went to Stanford and someone asked me, “Did you know
your father?” And it’s like, “He was home when I left, I don’t know. What are you talking
about?” They were eliciting that story of me no longer having a father. Oftentimes when I
meet with groups I’ll say, “Take some aspect of your identity, be it your race, your gender,
your height, your sexual orientation. And tell the story about when that was challenging
for you. But tell a story of when that was empowering and right for you.” And what I’m
trying to elicit there is that you have all these stories. And what we do in society oftentimes,
especially in these mixed groups, is choose to hear the former story rather than the latter
story. We want to hear all about how hard it was being black and gay and in the ghettos of
Detroit. I’m not saying it’s not. But it’s just incomplete. So I’m six of nine. And I grew up in
this very loving family. It was not easy for them and for me because of a couple of things.
I left the church very early. My father was a minister. I created all kinds of “othering” as
you might say. And Brené Brown, who writes about the intense pain of being othered in
your own family—that’s what I had. But we all have experienced something “other.” And
we all have a desire and experiences of belonging. But the family unit is so important in
terms of that practice. So is the nation state. So there are these large collective spaces where
we need to belong and then are these very intimate spaces where we need to belong.Well, one of the things that makes life
interesting and complicated is that there’s
this ambiguity to things. And sometimes
we try to nail down the ambiguities. Like, “Did you see the way that person looked at me?”
“Yeah, I think they’re flirting with you.” “Oh okay!” But maybe they’re actually thinking I’m
shoplifting. It’s not always clear. With groups, there’s a concept of bridging, breaking and
bonding. And groups come together, oftentimes bonding when there’s a threat. In some ways
our belonging, which is a kind of bonding itself, is evolutionary. We wouldn’t have survived
if we didn’t belong. No mammal, or very few mammals, can survive without parents, without
somebody that can protect them. And then you think about living in tribes, humans were not
the top of the food chain. Again, humans only survived if they were in a tribe.[Laughs].
While you were at Stanford you helped co-found the black
student union there. I wondered if that was an act of belonging?102
JOHN A. POWELL
DUMBO FEATHER