Imagine a hurricane inside a meditation - that’s where we stand in our national conversation on race. But our knowledge of reality is frail. What we need is a daring guide to brave the unknown and push us closer to understanding others and ourselves. But the adventurer must be bold enough to climb the mountain of race and ethnicity, away from distortion. Enter Joe Nalven. Nalven enthusiastically ventures upward without a safety net, guide, or crystal ball to decipher what is to come. From puzzles and paradoxes, Nalven introduces readers to individuals who step outside our wicked limitations. A mystic, a writer of utopias and dystopias, an anthropologist apprenticed to a shaman, to name a few of the multitude of encounters in Nalven’s personal voyage to move beyond the philosophical, psychological, cultural, legal and aesthetic barriers surrounding racial identity and find a new perspective. Highly inventive and thought provoking, I and the Other invites us to examine the way we think about others and ourselves and consider how we share the same world in unexpected and unique ways.