In this episode of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers welcomes her "name twin" — Dr. Suzanne Barakat, physician, humanitarian, and a leading voice on refugee health, asylum medicine, and countering Islamophobia. 

Dr. Barakat, who is from North Carolina, traces her connection to the refugee experience back to her own roots: from summers in Syria and then two years of high school there, to watching as an adult as the Syrian crisis forced her her extended family— who once all lived on the same street — to relocate  across the globe. She describes her journey as a doctor caring for those in crisis, including returning again and again to the Syrian-Turkish border, and shares her most recent trip topost-regime Syria to bear witness and help forge the country’s forensic response .

Dr. Barakat also shares the gripping story she shared in her popular TED Talk: when she was still a medical student, a white supremacist broke into her family members’ home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and murdered them while they were eating dinner. She asks the question: What if rather than “otherize” her relatives, the perpetrator of this hate crime had sat down and gotten to know them? And what can we learn from this unspeakable tragedy about the power of asking, as leaders, “Who is not at this table, and needs to be?”

This conversation raises important questions about our shared humanity and gets to the heart of what the Not Really Strangers podcast is all about.  

Topics Discussed:

  • Growing up between North Carolina and Syria; two formative years of high school in Idlib
  • The slow, devastating displacement of Dr. Barakat's extended Syrian family
  • Volunteering on the Syria-Turkey border: clinical work under impossible conditions, language barriers, and dignity of care
  • Otherization as the root cause of violence and genocide
  • The 2015 Chapel Hill murders of Dr. Bakarat’s family and her fight to have them recognized as a hate crime
  • Visiting Syria six weeks after the fall of the Assad regime; bearing witness to the destroyed town of Wulta
  • Shaping Syria's national forensic response: missing persons, mass graves, and the imperative of local leadership
  • Why justice, including narrative acknowledgment, is inseparable from peace
  • Confronting implicit bias and the moral courage required to act
  • Finding purpose after personal trauma: the SF Muslim Fellowship
  • The dinner table as a question of inclusion: who is not here and needs to be?

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