What Remains Between Us

What remains after the conversation moves on.

On residue, inherited tension, and the social afterlife of proximity

Sometimes conflicts and tensions disappear publicly long before they disappear socially.

The conversation moves on. The room changes subject. But something quieter — and often more potent — remains underneath. Not always visible enough to name directly, but present enough to shape how people continue meeting each other afterward.

While writing recently about proximity between Black and South Asian communities, and the conditions shaping how we meet each other, a familiar pattern was unfolding again in real time. A public conversation in Kenya around integration, separation, and belonging had begun exposing familiar tensions—not simply because of what was said, but because of everything sitting underneath it. The reactions felt older than the incident itself. Less like a new conversation than another iteration of something many people already knew intimately.

What stayed with me wasn’t only the disagreement itself, but the emotional familiarity surrounding it. The speed at which people became defensive and flooded the comments section. The exhaustion in others who recognized the pattern immediately. The quiet recognition from people caught between communities, trying to explain tensions they’d long lived with but rarely had language for directly.

It made me think about how people can carry unresolved feelings for generations without naming them openly. Sometimes through dramatic acts of rupture or violence. Other times through smaller social habits: distance mistaken for preference, silence mistaken for peace, caution mistaken for harmony.

Part of what makes these tensions difficult to confront is that many of the people who experienced the original ruptures had little space to fully process them. Survival came first. Migration came first. Stability came first. Many experiences became folded into silence, caution, distance.

Over time, newer generations inherit those emotional postures without inheriting the full history beneath them. Sometimes what gets passed down is not the event itself, but the social behavior surrounding it.

Who feels familiar. Who feels threatening. Who is kept at a distance.

It’s only recently that many people have begun publicly discussing the inherited trauma of Partition and its afterlives across generations. If those histories can remain emotionally active long after the original rupture, it becomes harder to ignore how other unresolved forms of collective trauma may also continue shaping how people relate to one another in the present.

Migration often heightens survival instincts. In unfamiliar environments, people naturally move toward what feels familiar: shared language, religion, food, family structures, community. Familiarity can offer stability. But over time, survival strategies can also harden into social boundaries, especially when the fears or ruptures beneath them are never fully confronted.

You can sometimes feel these inheritances most clearly in ordinary relationships. In friendships where certain conversations never fully happen. In the family member who becomes quiet when someone brings home a partner from a different community. In the awkward pause after a joke lands wrong at a dinner table and nobody quite knows whether to address it or move on. In the way people can share neighborhoods, music, food, language, intimacy, while still carrying unspoken assumptions beneath it all.

This is part of what makes proximity so difficult to read from the outside. Familiarity can look like trust. Shared culture can look like relationship. But what exists beneath it can be something more conditional: a closeness that holds comfortably until history, politics, race, caste, or conflict enters the room.

Over time, that kind of conditional closeness can become exhausting to navigate. People begin editing themselves around each other. Avoiding certain subjects to keep the peace. Swallowing discomfort to preserve friendships, relationships, workplaces, communities. Others begin expecting rupture before it even arrives. A comment gets overanalyzed. A silence becomes loaded. Political moments suddenly expose tensions that had been sitting quietly beneath everyday interactions all along.

And because there is often no shared language or structure for working through those moments together, many relationships simply absorb the pressure until they quietly fracture under it. Not always dramatically. Sometimes through distance. Through people deciding certain conversations are no longer worth having. Through communities remaining physically close while becoming emotionally cautious and suspicious around each other.

These dynamics can become even more complicated when institutions or dominant groups selectively elevate certain minority voices in ways that reinforce older hierarchies rather than dismantle them. At times, one community’s success gets used to discipline or invalidate another community’s experiences, creating the impression that belonging or proximity to power must be earned through separation rather than solidarity.

For some, those moments echo in uncomfortable ways: watching one community welcomed into national belonging while another remains associated with suspicion, precarity, or exclusion. Over time, those moments can reactivate older feelings tied to hierarchy, exclusion, and conditional belonging. Not only because of individual personalities, but because they echo familiar colonial patterns: selective recognition, comparative uplift, and communities being positioned differently in relation to power.

Maybe part of the difficulty is that proximity was never designed to become relationship in the first place. Many of our communities inherited contact without necessarily inheriting the tools needed to navigate what came with it: grief, hierarchy, resentment, intimacy, misunderstanding, dependency, memory.

And yet, despite all of this, people still continue trying to find ways toward each other. Through friendship. Through marriage. Through neighborhoods, organizing, art, music, study, family, political struggle, and everyday life. Maybe that says something important too: that beneath the residue, there is still a desire for relation that keeps reappearing, even when the structures around it remain unresolved.

But desire alone does not undo history. And proximity does not teach people how to stay present with each other once tension enters the room.

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Author Bio

Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cultural architect working at the intersection of Black and South Asian diasporas. Through film, installation, writing, and public humanities work, his practice explores how race, caste, memory, migration, and colonialism shape the conditions of everyday life. He is the founder of the BlindianProject, a cultural initiative examining how Black and South Asian communities inherit, negotiate, and reimagine proximity across diaspora.

Organizational Note

The BlindianProject is fiscally sponsored by the Dream Big Youth Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions made in support of the project are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

EIN: 39-4945347