Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Diversity

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Feb 24, 2023, at 7:30 AM, Crystal Farmer <crystalbyrdfarmer [at] 
> gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> We've now come to the part of the merry go round where people are told not
> to have thick skin because being offended is part of life in community.
> Like Hafidha said, this is why you don't have diversity. I encourage you to
> at least consider that the harm caused in this conversation is more than
> discomfort that we have to put up with. It's unacceptable.

I don’t want to open this thread again because I think it has exhausted itself 
with hypotheticals, but the other side of the merry-go-round is believing that 
what people (of whatever majority or minority population) are saying is that 
you have to have thick skin to live in community. And that this is why we don’t 
have diversity in cohousing. 

In my experience, we have as much diversity in cohousing as there is likely to 
be in any small community of choice. This is why it is important to have 
efforts like the one Alan is spearheading. And to have conversations about the 
kinds of things that people find difficult to live with. But it is partly just 
the nature of the beast. People like to live with people like themselves.

It’s also hard to talk about hypotheticals because we tend to assume that 
everyone is talking from the standpoint of the majority European American, 
college-educated, business/government/non-profit/professional class. My 
cohousing context is probably quite different than many cohousing communities. 
We have households that include trans, single and coupled gay men and women, 
with and without children; “biracial" households; physically challenged people; 
adopted children of several nationalities; low-income and wealthy, etc. We have 
devout Jews and devout Christians. Army colonels and Quakers.

Because we are in DC we also have had native Nigerian, German, and 
Spanish-speaking households. We have a Mayan Indian, too, which is ironic. She 
had her DNA done because she was convinced she was predominantly African 
American but she came out Mayan. Not too incredible because she is Columbian, 
but a surprise for her.

And still, people will say we aren’t diverse because DC is 40% African American 
and we are far from that. But it is also a generalization that DC is 40% 
African American because the Black community is exceptionally diverse because 
of the Embassies from many African and Middle East countries. There are major 
differences between the French and British-English speaking communities. And 
the Jamaican communities that don’t all identify with the others.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org