When Belonging Turns on Itself

“You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” —Deuteronomy 10:19

A friend wrote to me from Montréal to tell me that there were posters appearing in parks and around schools. Anonymous groups calling for Canada to be “Canadian” again. This amidst increasing numbers of protests calling for the “remigration” of people based on skin color. A rising confidence among those who seem to believe that the path to safety runs through exclusion.

“It’s a terrifying time,” she wrote.

Montréal has always struck me as one of those places where belonging is layered. My son went to school there, driving from our native New York a few times a year. We agreed that the bagels came close to being as good as those in NY. But what stayed with me after our visits was how complex and richly textured the city felt with its mix of French and English, immigrants and native-born, Catholics and secular. Indigenous, European, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, Asian; it’s a city of languages and histories and neighborhoods, full of the ache and beauty of difference.

And yet, of course, no place is immune from the temptation to narrow the circle of belonging. Indeed, for many years, Montreal was one of the centers of Québécois nationalism.

When I asked my friend what all of this meant to her, she answered not as a pundit but as a mother. She’s had to explain these posters to her daughter. And that’s where it hit me deepest, as a parent and now, as a grandparent—two times over.

What do we tell our children when hatred shows up on the playground? What do we say when they ask, in whatever words children use, “What does this mean? Who are they talking about, Mommy? Are we safe? Do we belong?”

My friend tells her daughter that people are scared and that, when people are frightened, they often search for someone to blame, someone to hate. She tells her that there’s no such thing as a “real” Canadian any more than there is a “true” American. She reminds her that we come from immigrants, even those of us who are now seen as white, even those of us whose ancestors learned how to belong.

The belonging that comes from whiteness, for example, has never been as stable as we pretend. Many of the people now comfortably included within its definition would once have been excluded, including my Irish and Italian ancestors. But, too, Jews, Eastern Europeans, and Catholics. Among the many who have lived through systemic othering are those who are simply poor, as well as those with the wrong language, the wrong accent, the wrong name, the wrong body, the wrong God.

And then, over time, the circle of belonging shrunk. Some were let in, and still others were kept out.

Such is one of the lies that fuels the politics of purity: the claim that belonging is ancient, fixed, obvious, and natural. It isn’t; belonging is a construct—taught, enforced, withheld, or, if we’re kind, expanded.

In Reunion, I wrote about systemic belonging, the experience of being held within a web of connection wide enough to include one’s whole self, one’s ancestors, and those who would otherwise be considered the other. In writing that book, I came to understand one of the most dangerous forces in our societies as what I now think of as anti-systemic belonging: the lie that claims, “You are safe because they are not. You are clean because they are dirty. You are real because they are false. You are home, and therefore they must be removed.”

This is fear exploiting one of our most sacred longings: the wish to come home.

We see it in the language of purity. We see it when people talk about making a nation “itself” again, as if the nation were ever one thing. We see it when the complexity of economic anxiety, demographic change, loneliness, cultural dislocation, political failure, and spiritual despair is collapsed into one simple command: blame them. Always the other.

The immigrant. The refugee. The Muslim. The Jew. The Black neighbor. The English speaker. The French speaker. The Roma family. The asylum seeker. The trans child. The woman who knows too much—the too-much woman whom society still cannot seem to bear.

My friend told me she traces her emotional lineage, her identity, back to the women in Salem hanged as witches. That history lives in her body. She knows something about what happens when fear goes hunting for a body to accuse and cast out. She knows that the accused change across generations, but the mechanism remains the same.

A community becomes frightened, and stories begin to circulate. (“They’re eating the dogs,” they shout about the unwelcome others. “They’re eating the cats.”) People are called the source of contamination and then ordinary people do extraordinary harm while telling themselves they’re protecting the innocent.

This happens everywhere, among all people.

As I write this, in Belfast, a brutal stabbing has set the old machinery humming back to life. On Monday night, a man named Stephen Ogilvie was attacked on a city street, slashed in the face and neck; he survived, but lost an eye. The man charged with attempted murder is an asylum seeker from Sudan. It was a horrible act. And within hours, people who had committed no crime were made to bear the guilt of the one accused. Masked men set fire to homes believed to house immigrants. Families fled. And once again, it was the victim’s own family—keeping vigil at his hospital bedside—who called loudest for calm, insisting that migrants “make a deeply valuable contribution” to their country and pleading that this tragedy not be used to divide.

These are the moments when a society reveals itself. Can we grieve what was done to one man without surrendering to vengeance? Can we seek justice without making a whole people guilty? Can we hold fear without turning it into permission to burn someone else’s home, to lynch a father or a son?

Anti-systemic belonging always offers relief; that’s what makes it so seductive. It directs our pain, and it gives fear a face. It gives the scared a feeling of superiority. It gives the dislocated a fantasy of safety.

But it cannot heal; it can only feed on difference and unexamined histories, nourishing old wounds and encouraging people to settle grievances and old scores. It feeds on economic inequality, on leaders willing to trade human dignity for applause or votes. It feeds on our unwillingness to ask what is really broken about our societies.

What’s broken when a person needs an enemy in order to feel at home? What’s broken when a community can only imagine safety as removal? What’s broken when the answer to suffering is not care, but accusation, and empathy is a source of derision?

These aren’t merely political questions; they are questions about who we are as a society, spiritual questions, questions about our humanity. They are, in the end, leadership questions.

Every leader, whether of a company, a community, a family, or a nation, participates in shaping the boundaries of belonging. We do it in the stories we tell. We do it in who gets heard. We do it in whose pain is believed. We do it in who is asked to assimilate before being welcomed. We do it in the jokes we tolerate, the policies we defend, the histories we refuse to remember.

We also do it in moments of fear.

Fear itself isn’t the problem, of course. Fear is human. Fear arises when the world changes, when resources feel scarce, when the future becomes illegible, when the old maps no longer work. The question is not whether we will be afraid. The question is what we will allow fear to teach us. What do we teach our children and grandchildren about managing their fear?

Will we allow fear to draw the circle smaller, or will we allow it to teach us how deeply we need one another?

My friend told her daughter to look for similarity in others; not sameness but similarity. Or, as I noted in Reunion, kinship. Belonging doesn’t require that we pretend that we are not different. It requires the moral imagination to see another person as kin without needing them to be a copy of ourselves.

Kinship says, “I suffer when you suffer.” Kinship says, “Your story is my story.”

Kinship asks us to resist the easy intoxication of purity. It asks us to remember that every “real” people is made of borrowed blood, borrowed language, borrowed food, borrowed music, borrowed grief, borrowed hope.

There is no real Canadian if by “real” we mean untouched by migration, just as there’s no true American if by “true” we mean free of contradiction. There are no pure people; only people.

And there is the work of deciding, again and again, whether our longing to belong will become a bridge or a weapon. My friend’s daughter is learning that lesson earlier than any child should have to. But perhaps all of us need to learn it now.

Belonging built on exclusion is a frightened house with locked doors and a fire burning inside.

The work before us is harder and holier than that. The work is to build a house of belonging wide enough for truth, memory, difference. Wide enough, even, for our fear, so that fear does not have to become hatred. That is the reunion we need now.