See No Stranger
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"We can have all the empathy in the world for a group of people and still participate in the structures and systems that oppress them."
Part memoir, part historical account of the political and societal forces that swept the US after 9/11, See No Stranger is a powerful argument for why neither power nor empathy is enough on its own - to create true, lasting change both are needed. We must have enough empathy for those who don't look like us to sit down and bridge the gap of understanding, working together to identify the changes needed to improve the world for the next generation. And we must have enough power to get those changes implemented.
Valarie Kaur weaves together her personal and professional stories as she shares her journey of coming to terms with her own trauma, learning to set healthy boundaries with family, and travels across the US talking to people impacted by 9/11. She travels to the 9/11 memorial, sites of hate crimes, and even Guantanamo Bay to better understand the underlying motivations that bring people together or push them to inflict such pain on those around them. She also spends a lot of time talking about the cognitive dissonance of having a deep love for her own family even as she needed to find a way to talk about the harm committed by people she loved, and how the mental and emotional pain translated to physical symptoms.
This is a perfect bookclub book to do a chapter at a time, reflecting on your responses to her writing in each section. She focuses heavily on the importance of love and curiosity/wonder, which can be very hard to even consider in times as high-stress and angry as we're currently living through. But that's the point - love and curiosity about the 'other' is what will pull us back out of this mess, and her writing is so well structured that about a paragraph after I would think "but what about..." she would answer my question.
Go find and read this book, I'll be adding it to my rotation of books I revisit every couple of years. Written or spoken, both formats are excellent. I paired it with a glass of dry red wine - if that isn’t the classic bookclub drink I don’t know what is.
