Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Diversity

[Catherine Fischer (fischercd]

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to introduce myself and add a few comments
about diversity.  I am a member of the Great Oak
Cohousing Community which is developing in Ann Arbor
Michigan.  I will be moving into cohousing from the
Detroit area with my family: a husband and two +
year-old son.  We are white and middle-class.  I was
raised middle-class and my husband was raised working
class.  

I struggle to balance between holding out a vision of
the community I hope to live in, and not pinning all
of my disappointments about society onto cohousing
when it doesn't actually meet the standards of my
vision.  (Which is most of the time, except with
regard to how the people in our community treat each
other.) 

I feel that I am giving up a great deal of exposure to
difference by leaving the Detroit area, but I'm not
giving up my commitment to building closeness with
people of color, within and outside of cohousing.

I appreciated the posting which suggested actions for
white people to take in order to process our own
racism and come out on the other side of it.  I agee
that building close relationships with people of color
is a key element.  The divisions in society are so
unnatural that of course in our hearts we yearn for
diversity of all sorts.  But having been raised white
with the toxic misinformation from society that we are
superior has had many effects white people all need to
work on.  We need to fight our way through the
passivity and hopelessness that was fostered in us by
a racist society and comes out in feelings like racism
is "too big" and we "don't know what to do about it."
We need to work on feelings that we are bad or boring
so that we can actually show ourselves to people of
color.  We need to risk making mistakes and listen
when we do.  We need to educate ourselves about the
experiences and perspectives of other groups, as the
other writer mentions.

People of color need to be able to see that white
people are *thinking* about racism and how to end it
on all levels.  Otherwise, what will they have to be
hopeful about regarding joining a community?

An example, using class rather than race, was just
posted by the woman who described living with middle
class people in a group house as "stressful."  I'll
bet she was putting that nicely, if those others
didn't have an understanding about their own class
privilege and ways class oppression hurts working
class people.

Finally, I'd like to briefly comment on the use of the
term "oreo" in another posting.  (Sorry, I haven't
saved items to cut and paste for quotes since I didn't
plan ahead of time to post this.) Because painful
divisions in the black community in the U.S. have been
based on deciding who is "more" or "less" Black, with
negative connotations going in both directions at
different times, I find this to be a hurtful term.  I
assume the writer was trying to refer to people of
color whose life experiences or values make cohousing
an especially good "fit".  But it also implies that
those people are somehow not fully people of color,
which seems like a hurtful thing to say and not an
assumption that I want people of color to face from
any quarter.

So,  of course we want people of color invovled from
the beginning as cohousing groups form.  And of course
we long for the world to be right, and diversity to be
the norm.  But racism hasn't been dismantled...yet.  
Let's not forget, or ignore, as white people, the
enormous work we have before us to tackle our own
issues around race. Whether a cohousing group becomes
more or less diverse doesn't change that task, and is
in fact probably shaped by it to a great degree.

Sincerely,
Catherine Fischer
Great Oak Cohousing
Ann Arbor Michigan
www.greatoakcohousing.org

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