What We Lose When We Can't Talk to Each Other
The past 10 years have done major damage to our social fabric.
By EBOO PATEL
Originally published by Persuasion, September 21, 2025.
When I was a graduate student in England 25 years ago, I fell in love with the novel White Teeth. It was written by a woman named Zadie Smith, and I thought it perfectly captured the music of pluralism. Smith basically fictionalized the neighborhood she grew up in northwest London. It was a neighborhood of genuine diversityâthere were rich and poor, middle class and working class. There were longtime residents who were white English Anglicans and atheists, and more recent communities of Jamaican Evangelicals and Pakistani Muslims.
From her perch in a council estate (which is the British term for a housing project) Zadie Smith wrote about the friendships and feuds, the romances and reconciliations, of this motley crew of friends and neighbors, a motley crew she clearly loved.
One of my favorite scenes took place in a playground. Zadie Smith sets it up like this: âIt is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang OâRourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course.â
My research was in London, and every time I passed a playground, I found myself looking for those charactersâlooking for children of different backgrounds whose identities were supposed to be on a collision course, even internally, and yet who were instead coming together to form that most precious of human creationsâa community.
Here is how Zadie Smith described this signal achievement in human civilization: âwe have finally slipped into each otherâs lives with reasonable comfort.â
White Teeth was a blockbuster success. Think of it as the Hamilton of its era. Zadie Smith found herself a global figure, taking up university positions and writing fellowships in different parts of the world.
In 2016, Smith returned to the old neighborhood. She came to tend to a family member who had an illness. One of the first things she noticed was that the playground she had immortalized in her first novel, the one which held together those children whose names were on a collision course, had a new fence around it, a fence with tall bamboo slats between the bars that blocked views from the outside in, and the inside out.
She started seeing fences all around her old neighborhood, around the entire city of London, in fact. Mansions had fences, public schools had fences, religious communities had fencesâactual, physical barriers.
We all remember the divisive election that took place in the United States in 2016. There was a British version of that: the Brexit referendum.
Smith noticed that Brexit revealed a different kind of fence, an invisible fence, what she started calling the fence of âRight Opinionââtoo tall to climb over, too thick to see through, sometimes electrified, making it ever so easy to caricature the people on the other side, and so hard to actually talk to them.
It was a situation that occurred at a playground which brought this truth home, the very playground where Zadie Smith had based that scene from White Teeth. Zadieâs little daughter was playing with another motherâs little son. They seemed to be quite enamored of one another. When Zadie went to engage with the boyâs mother to suggest a playdate between her daughter and the other womanâs son, she noticed right away that the woman was about fifteen years younger, and white, and working class. There was a high likelihood that they were on the opposite sides of the Fence of Right Opinion with respect to Brexit.
In a real-life moment so fraught with tension that it could have been a scene in a novel, Smith and this other mother put their respective children in their respective strollers at the same time, and trudged up the hill to their respective houses virtually side by side, all in silence. Smith watched as the woman turned left into the very council estate in which she had grown up, while she turned right into the new development full of fine, large houses, including one with the shiny black door belonging to her. She felt the withering stare of the other mother:Â You live in one of the big houses. You are one of those.
