Community: Now More Important Than Ever

The Power We Have When We Come Together

Editor’s Note: In January and February, our deep dive articles focused on economic issues affecting living costs, housing and healthcare with the goal of equipping you to have conversations with friends, family and neighbors to help them understand and realize the effects of Trump’s policies on our everyday lives. A list of those articles with links is at the bottom of this article. This month, we shift our focus to Community, Family and the Patriarchy with the goal of providing you with information that you can use to help create greater community with your friends, family and neighbors. This article on Community is the first in a series.

What is Community?

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has about 10 different definitions of “community,” and in conversations with other people, we hear different views on what constitutes community. If we look across these various definitions, a pattern arises that boils down to “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location.” Community is about finding your people and banding together with them for mutual support and in many instances, working together to create a better life for every member of the community. Communities can be built around a common identity such as religion, school, sexual identity, neighborhood, political party or a hobby. It can also be built around an issue such as the environment, climate change, equal rights, immigrant issues or getting healthcare for all. The possibilities are endless but we hear from many that they want “community.” When I first moved to Grand Rapids, some friends took me to a queer dry bar where we spent a lovely afternoon playing card games with a few LGBTQ+ people. While we were there, a woman came into the dry bar and told us that she and her partner had just moved to Grand Rapids. Her first question? “Where is the community?”

The Benefits of Community

Community provides significant benefits. Coming together with like-minded individuals can create a sense of belonging and purpose where people feel validated and supported. It can also create a sense of being part of something larger than just oneself. Community members provide each other with mental and emotional support and sometimes even physical support. They bring soup to sick friends, help care for children and seniors or just be there to listen. Community members look out for each other, creating a safer and more secure environment. Community members are able to share information and resources to solve problems and address societal issues. All of these activities can create a society that cares for everyone, regardless of who they are.

Why Should We Care About Community at This Moment?

The United States is currently very divided as those individuals who benefit from our country’s vast economic inequality are reaping the benefits of 250+ years of pitting working class groups against each other to block support for any collective action that benefits all of us, whether that be living wages, affordable housing and healthcare, a clean environment or public services. Racism has been employed by the elite class to distract the working class from the reality that the political-economic system favors the rich and not the working class. This strategy has been so successful that many Americans view race as a zero-sum game where what’s good for “them” is bad for “us.” Blaming another ethnic or racial group for our lot in life is rampant in this country. Isabel Wilkerson, in her book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” does an excellent job of showing how this phenomenon is so deeply woven into the fabric of our history that when the Nazis were putting together their strategy for targeting and eliminating Jews from their society, they looked to the American caste system for how to get it done.

The elite class is able to maintain its status as long as the working class continues to divide into smaller groups that work against each other. What does the elite class really fear? Community. When diverse groups in the working class come together to support programs that benefit all, the community will prevail. Creating community is the ultimate form of resistance that can overcome our societal problems.

What Can Happen When the Community Comes Together?

In her book “The Sum of Us,” Heather McGhee describes a situation that took place in Richmond, California, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city is heavily segregated with white people living in a part of the city where housing was built in part with developer financing guaranteed by the Federal Housing Authority on the condition that none of the new housing could be sold to anyone who was not 100% white. The city’s black families were forced into an unincorporated area known as North Richmond which had no roads, streetlights, water or sewage. Over the years, Latino and Asian people also moved into North Richmond.

Richmond is also the home of one of the country’s largest oil refineries owned by Chevron. The industrial pollution caused by Chevron has led to thirteen times as many air quality violations as the Bay Area’s average over a decade. Chevron has been operating this refinery in Richmond for more than a hundred years and controlled city programs and laws by controlling the city council and cultivating relationships with local groups in a racially divisive manner that pitted the groups against each other for small funding grants and scholarships.

In the early 2000s, local activists brought these diverse groups together to propose and vet candidates for the city council. They knocked on doors to get out the votes for their candidates and were successful in voting out the “Chevron” council members and voting in a progressive majority. Things are turning around for the city of Richmond because the people came together and created community. A solar energy project owned by the public has resulted in lower energy costs, Richmond residents have a training program to get hundreds of clean energy jobs, climate pollution is being addressed and new local-owned cooperatives are being created.

Creating Community

We are also living in a time, especially after Covid, where people have become increasingly home-bound and isolated from their neighbors. We spend more time looking at our phones than we do interacting with real, live people. We need to overcome this inertia and take action to create community that benefits us all. Watch for Part Two of this article which will focus on how you can create community. Here are some simple things you can do in the meantime:

• Share this article with friends, family and neighbors and have a discussion about community.

• Join something, whether it is a local church, community action group, or a hobby group.

• Come to an Indivisible Greater Grand Rapids meeting and volunteer for one of our events or committees.

Sources:

• Merriam-Webster Incorporated, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10^th Edition, (Springfield, Massachusetts, Merriam-Webster Incorporated, 1993), p. 232.

• Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, (New York, Random House, 2020)

• Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us, (New York, One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021), pp. 209-215.