Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Diversity

[Paul B. Chen (pzbc]

As initiator of the current diversity thread, I want to first thank 
everyone for their comments and suggestions.  I've just joined this list 
recently, and have found it to be top notch.  I particularly enjoy the 
high degree of respect members pay to each other.  Quite a feat in a 
world of lists where flaming is sport.

I wanted to take a minute to follow-up to a line of questioning opened by 
at least the folk below, and I think a couple of others as well.


On 3/15, George Marx wrote: 

"Do you want them (African Americans) for what they offer to you or to 
assuage guilt over their 
exclusion?"


On 3/16, Verna H. Denny wrote:

"I think each co-housing group has to think
about why they want African Americans, or any other specific group, as 
part
of their community.   Is it because you want to enrich the lives of your 
own
children, for example, by making sure they are exposed to the larger
community they will come in contact with in their adult lives?  I always 
have
a problem with this kind of reasoning.  I would like to be included 
because
I'm valued as an individual and human being, not because exposure to me 
makes
someone else's life richer."


I'd like to respond not because I feel a need to defend, but just to 
offer perspective, well, at least mine.  I seek diversity for the reason 
Verna states: enrichment.  Now, while I understand Verna's issue with 
this, there's a chicken and egg problem here: I cannot value a specific 
individual until I get to know him or her.  At the same time, desire for 
diversity does not preclude valuing each person for what they are.  

Another list contributor asked if we seek diversity as tokenism, and I 
would say that is not the case.  Probably like most other cohousing 
communities, we would like others who share our core values, so yes to 
diversity, but within parameters.  Of course, having said that, we 
recognize the degree of diversity is immediately limited, but that is 
pretty much the case in almost all social organizations: the process of 
self selection is always present and will run its course.  One might 
argue, then, that diversity thus defined is really no diversity at all, 
but I do not believe that to be the case.  Just because I, an 
American-born Chinese, share the same values with our mostly white core 
group members doesn't mean that I do not have race-unique experiences to 
share.  

If there is a shadow side in our desire for diversity, it is a certain 
level of discomfort among the group that we could be a mostly-white 
enclave within a mostly black neighborhood.  I cannot articulate the 
reasons for this discomfort, or what's really behind as we have not 
discussed this as a group, but clearly, we don't want to feel alone.  All 
minority groups can relate to this.  In particular, I suspect, most 
African Americans and people like myself, who, on visiting the land of 
their ancestors, discover that it is most weird to finally be in the 
racial majority, but never feeling more like a minority!




Paul B. Chen
pbchen [at] mindspring.com 

East Lake Commons - a cohousing/ecovillage of 67 units in two communities 
on 17 acres of urban land just minutes from downtown Atlanta.