We Forgot We Were Family

There are countless moments that stay with me from my travels through Southeast Asia and Europe — like wandering a night market in Chiang Mai, surrounded by people speaking languages I didn't know, eating food I couldn't name, and feeling, somehow, completely at home. Or catching the eye of the woman sitting across from me on a train in Portugal. No words. No shared history. Just two humans recognizing each other across the aisle.

Those moments felt like a truth I already knew but had somehow forgotten. We are, at our core, one human family.

So how did we get so convinced otherwise?

The ancient Romans had a phrase for it: divide et impera. Divide and rule. The strategy is simple and devastatingly effective — if you can keep the people beneath you focused on their differences, they'll never look up long enough to notice who's holding the reins. It was Roman imperial policy. It was British colonial strategy, explicitly deployed in India and Africa to fracture existing communities along ethnic and religious lines. And it didn't stop there.

It is, in fact, an ancient playbook that keeps getting used because it keeps working.

I spent most of my life not thinking about any of this. Then, gradually, I couldn't stop. It started with paying closer attention — to history, to headlines, to the structures quietly shaping daily life — and once those patterns came into focus, they showed up everywhere. In policy. In media. In the stories we're told about who we are and what we deserve. I don't think that awareness is a bad thing, even when it's uncomfortable. If anything, I think it's exactly what's supposed to happen when we start asking honest questions.

And the most honest question I kept arriving at was: who benefits when we're too busy fighting each other to look up?

In America, the strategy took on a specific shape. After the Civil War, poor white farmers and poor Black farmers had enormous shared interests — land rights, fair wages, freedom from economic exploitation. For a brief window during the Populist movement of the 1880s and 90s, some of them started to act on that shared interest. It terrified the landowning class. What followed was a systematic campaign — through law, violence, and propaganda — to convince poor white Southerners that their real enemy was their Black neighbor, not the wealthy landowner extracting labor from both of them.

Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan who understood this history intimately, reportedly captured the mechanism with brutal clarity: convince someone they're better than the person next to them, and you can pick their pocket clean while they're busy looking down. Give them someone to look down on, and they'll hand over their wallet themselves.*

The tactic didn't end with Reconstruction. It shapeshifts. Sometimes it's race. Sometimes it's immigration. Sometimes it's religion, or gender, or sexuality, or geography — city versus rural, coastal versus heartland. The specific "other" changes depending on what's useful. The underlying structure doesn't.

And while we're busy being angry at each other, wealth continues concentrating at the top at rates not seen since the Gilded Age. The top 1% of Americans now hold more wealth than the entire middle class combined. Voting rights get quietly stripped. Workers' protections erode. Democracy gets hollowed out — not all at once, but incrementally, in ways that are easy to miss when you're distracted.

None of this is conspiracy thinking. It's history. Documented, studied, and available to anyone who goes looking.

Here's what else history tells us: people figure it out. Not always, and not easily, but sometimes. The labor movement of the early 20th century was built on workers — of different ethnicities, languages, and backgrounds — recognizing they had more in common with each other than with their bosses. The Civil Rights movement was a coalition. The Women's Suffrage movement crossed class lines. These weren't naive exercises in optimism. They were strategic acts of solidarity by people who looked at a divided world and chose to see through it.

That choice is always available to us.

Maya Angelou wrote a poem called "Human Family" that I keep returning to. It catalogs all the ways we differ — in our heights, our memories, our loves and shames and fears — and arrives at a simple, unassailable conclusion: we are more alike than we are unalike. I'd encourage you to read it or listen to it (link included above). It will take only a minute or two and might rearrange something in you.

We are living through a moment when the old playbook is being run loudly and without much pretense. I think it's essential to name what it is. But naming it is only the first step. The second step is refusing to let it work on us — choosing to see our neighbors, whoever they are, as members of the same family before we see them as members of the opposing team.

And the third step is doing something.

If you want to act, here are places to start:

Some are loud acts and some are quiet ones, and all of them matter.

• Talk to people who aren't like you — not to debate, but to actually listen. Organizations like Braver Angels and Essential Partners exist specifically to facilitate this.

• Get educated on local politics — this is where the real levers are. School boards, city councils, and state legislatures shape daily life far more than most federal policy. Show up.

• Support journalism — local, independent, and investigative. This one deserves a little more explanation, because the media landscape has become genuinely confusing. Social media feeds us content that looks like news but is often opinion, outrage, or outright misinformation dressed up in headline format. Real journalism — the kind that holds power accountable — requires reporters who have time to investigate, editors who fact-check, and institutions that aren't dependent on clicks or sponsors to survive. Here's what that can look like in practice:

  • Subscribe to or donate to local news outlets. Local journalism has been gutted over the past two decades, and it's where the most direct accountability reporting happens — city budgets, school boards, local elections. If your city has an independent local paper or nonprofit news site, support it financially if you can.

  • Seek out investigative and nonprofit newsrooms. Organizations like ProPublica and The Marshall Project do deep, sourced, long-form investigative work that commercial outlets often can't sustain. Most are free to read and donor-supported.

  • Learn to vet your sources. Before sharing something, ask: who wrote this, when, and for what publication? Can the core claim be found in multiple reputable outlets? Is this a news article or an opinion piece? A simple habit of checking AllSides or Ad Fontes Media's bias chart can help you understand where a source sits on the spectrum of reliability and political lean.

  • For a broader view, Ground News aggregates the same story from dozens of outlets — domestic and international, left and right — so you can see not just what's being reported but how differently it's being framed depending on who's telling it. International coverage of U.S. stories in particular can be eye-opening.

  • Be skeptical of headlines designed to make you angry. Outrage is the most shareable emotion, and it's also the one most easily manufactured. If something makes your blood boil, that's exactly the moment to slow down and verify before passing it on.

• Read the history — Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains are good places to start.

• Vote in every election — especially the small ones most people skip.

We were never actually enemies. We just got really good at forgetting that.

*The LBJ quote is widely attributed and reported by journalist Ronald Kessler, but was a private remark and not a verified public record — worth noting even as the sentiment reflects well-documented history.