This work is spawn out of two entities: Unger’s life experiences while leading a diverse church in a diverse, urban neighborhood and her thirst for advanced education and stimulating reading. Using these two springboards, she shares lessons from her journey from a fundamentalist/evangelical background to where she is today. She describes how she believes that her life is now richer than it was before. She touches on issues of tribalism that plague pluralistic societies today – as they have in different ways for thousands of years before. Although she stops short of proclaiming the issue solved, she lifts from her struggle ideas that can point to a way forward.
Unger thoroughly dissects her life experiences through the lens of race and class (but notably not gender nor sexuality). She specifically and directly talks about her career in leading The Lift, a diverse church in a diverse setting in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. She discusses her “whiteness,” meaning her upbringing in a homogenous, white, middle-class neighborhood. The noted cultural differences appear at first glance to be very common among whites in America. She tries at length to help readers see beyond their own experiences into the lives of people different than them, much as she has done throughout her own life.
This book is most interesting through its combination of theory and practice. Many writers have only one of these prisms relatively mastered. Instead, Unger weaves both into one narrative. In one paragraph, she integrates theoreticians like Jürgen Habermas or Ethan Fromm with anecdotes about her friends who have starkly different life experiences. In so doing, she proves the value of social theory in her life. This instructs and inspires readers to take similar approaches with their own lives.
Writing in white America in 2021, I see that this book has obvious import into modern culture. Tribalism has affected the body politic as well as national culture in unhealthy ways. Such tribalism is especially bound by race and class, the main topics of this book. (Political affiliation should also be included in this list and are not addressed in this book. Although Unger writes from within the context of a Christian church, religious differences are not deeply addressed in this book either.) I’m not sure drastic changes in life situations – such as the author’s family made – are in order for everyone. Nonetheless, almost everyone in diverse, pluralistic societies can learn from her courage and life lessons.
Unger steadfastly maintains that tribalism is not the way forward; rather, it is in developing a tribe for ourselves, rich in racial and class differences. I’d like to add other diversities to that list, but am grateful for Unger’s explicit focus on these two. In so doing, she points to the way out of America’s national quagmire through combining theory with her own life.
Tribe: Why Do All Our Friends Look Just Like Us?
By Sandra Mayes Unger
Copyright (c) 2020
Fortress Press
ISBN13 978506446264
eBook
Genre: Sociology
www.amazon.com