A thoughtful and practical book about seeing others fully, in all their complexities and humanity, and treating them as such.

Thank you for sharing this book with me.
I appreciate the opportunity to read Seeing others and share it with my followers.

I loved that this book had a different take on the division our world is currently experiencing. It felt much more positive and uplifting than many of the similar books I’ve read.

Lamont builds the argument that our communities will be better once we develop a greater sense of recognition of one another. She goes in depth with what that looks like and how different change agents and the media can make a difference. The book felt much more asset-based and really made me think about things that I can do myself and activities I can facilitate with my students that will work towards lessening the divide between people with different identities.

This was a quick nonfiction read from sociology professor and researcher Michéle Lamont and I thought it was accessible and didn’t feel entirely academic or dense (and I have read a *lot* of stuffy academic journals because of my job so really, this was digestible and felt almost conversational, which was so nice).

I think this would be a great book for anyone’s work’s DEI book club, as a primer for understanding the importance and significance of each individual’s commitment to anti-racism and building a more just community, and hopefully, world.

This is the layout of the book, and the chapters are not too long either:
Introduction: The Power of Recognition
1. The View from Above: The Upper-Middle Class and the Failures of the American Dream
2. The View from Below: The Working Class and the Marginalized
3. Meeting the Moment: How We Fight for a More Inclusive World
4. Being the Change We Wish to See: Change Agents and the Quest for Dignity and Recognition
5. Changing Hearts and Minds: How Recognition Chains Amplify the Cultural Agenda
6. Strategies for Transformation: The Work of Change Agents in Hollywood and Beyond
7. The Next Generation: How Gen Z Fights for the Future
8. Different Yet the Same: Solutions for Building an Inclusive Society

Quotations that stood out to me:
Rather, we decide who matters—all of us, every day, by creating, supporting, and spreading new narratives about the worth of all groups. This is why worth should be factored in explicitly—in every social interaction on the street, as well as every legal and policy decision that our elected officials make. This is not to say that money and power do not matter. But whether groups are recognized and afforded dignity is just as important to their flourishing as human beings, just as vital to their drive to be all they can be.

Developing grit (or personal resilience) is often offered as the path to success by psychologists, governments, and policy makers without regard for the different types of support to which people have access. But grit is not determined by individual will; it is facilitated by material resources and social networks, and by narratives and institutions (such as schools) that empower people and recognize the value of their identity and experiences. To counter such misleading and harmful narratives, we need new ones—narratives that empower people and recognize the value of their experiences.

When I say “recognition,” I am not talking about mere identification, as when you recognize someone you know on the street; rather, I mean “seeing others” and acknowledging people’s existence and positive worth, actively making them visible and valued, reducing their marginalization, and openly integrating them into a group.

There are three main avenues for building recognition: through political activism and the law, through culture and media, and through our own interpersonal experiences and networks.

..many high-income families are blind to the many ways they pass on class privileges, and to how, in doing so, they block others from climbing as high as they have. In a 2002 survey that asked students at a competitive high school to rank factors determining a person’s future, 71.5 percent of respondents ranked individual effort at the top, ahead of factors like their parents’ background, social support, and quality of education. A study of privileged students at an elite boarding school also found a strong belief in hard work as the key to success.

One example will resonate with many of us: in 2016, a study of over four hundred primetime American sitcoms, totaling sixty-eight years of television, found that 80 percent of the shows’ characters were upper-middle class, while just 10 percent were working class. In the vast majority of cases, the working-class men were represented as buffoons or as incompetent, immature, ignorant, and irresponsible.

If the majority of people feel a divide between who they think they should be and what society makes possible, how can they be moved by a shared social vision of communal life?

In fact, individualist approaches may harm more than they help, since they pull people’s attention away from potentially more meaningful efforts. They are part of the problem, not solutions. Ultimately, if we truly want to address current challenges, we need to focus on addressing exclusion in our daily lives. We need to ask ourselves hard questions about how we decide who matters and what we can do to create a more inclusive society.

For change to last, we need to transform how we think about who matters. Americans often judge a person’s worth based not only on meritocratic factors like their dedication to their work, but also on their proximity to whiteness, their distance from poverty, or how “American” they are perceived to be (in self-presentation, accent, or familiarity with American sports and culture). Only once we are able to shift our national conversation and adopt a much broader conception of who “belongs” will we be able to make any progress.

Narratives are more than just stories—they are perspectives about society and social relations that allow people to make sense of the world. Generally, they are known or shared by group members and shape their lives, including how they decide who is worthy or unworthy.

And in all manner of social movements—from low-caste farmers in India, to girls seeking educational access in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, to Jews and queer people seeking protection from persecution in Hungary—people are also fighting for basic recognition of their whole selves.

Health researchers have found that recognition, stigmatization, and discrimination all affect our well-being. When people are devalued by the larger society, this assault on worth can batter their health.

A timely, compelling, and thought-provoking look at recognition and dignity. It is an accessible call to action with practical advice on how we can be more inclusive and how we can reshape narratives to reflect what we want society to be. Cultural norms can shift if we want them to, including how we define "success" and who gets to be recognized and feel worth (why not everyone?).

Thank you very much to Atria and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

Michele Lamont is a sociologist who recognizes that our ideas personally and collectively regarding determining whose stories matter is a complex one. Lamont speaks to how different schools of thought approach and analyze this question. The field of psychology is limited to a focus on the inner life and mind of individuals. Economists tend to focus on financial and material resources and how this impacts upward mobility and influence, etc. Michele Lamont is providing her readers with a full spectrum perspective on how recognition plays out both collectively in popular culture but also on an interpersonal, more intimate level.

Seeing Others is a book with less of a focus on what causes division among different groups and more of a focal point on how specific people taking specific action can lead to new ideas about worth and how groups of people are seen. By analyzing the role that recognition plays in our lives, who sees us and how we get seen, the author encourages us to acknowledge our own inherent worth and that of others. In order to really recognize each other we have to question stereotypes, stigma, and negative portrayals. This book provides a great roadmap for how to do that and where to begin.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!