Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Diversity

[carol collier (doctor5622no]

 To those that think this is human nature to live apart, you might want to do a 
little research beyond what you learned in your history classes. Have you ever 
heard of redlining? In the Color of Law written by Richard Rothstein, He 
writes, “A century of social engineering on the part of the federal, state, and 
local governments that enacted policies to keep African Americans separate and 
subordinate” has helped get us to where we are today. To this day, Blacks tend 
to be steered to majority Black neighborhoods when shown houses by real estate 
agents. Blacks tend to be shown more costly and higher interest rate loan 
products. Even the government has continued to promote segregation, at least 
under Trump, by segregating public housing based on race, by building such 
housing in segregated communities. Facebook was accused in 2019 of allowing 
advertisers to use data to exclude people from seeing advertisements for homes 
and apartments based on race. Living in Hawaii, not utopia but better than much 
of the mainland, gives me hope, while following this thread has made me feel 
hopeless. 
    On Friday, February 24, 2023, 09:08:26 AM HST, Lyle Scheer via Cohousing-L 
<cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:  
 
 Sigh.

I did just do that, didn't I?

gosh darn it... born and raised a cis white male, and living in a 
bubble.  I want to be an ally, but all I can seem to do is repeat the 
same errors.

I apologize to anyone who felt offended or hurt when I said in effect 
that people should have a thicker skin.

.... and now I'm probably going to step into it again, because it felt 
like there was a point in there somewhere, about different cultural 
norms.... about cultures basically self-selecting into their own little 
enclaves, because familiar finds familiar, and people *don't* like 
uncomfortable and don't want to have thicker skins.

It occurred to me, that to encourage diversity in coho US, might mean 
finding ways to help finance more diverse communities of lesser means to 
being co-housing communities.  It takes both money and time to create a 
co-housing community, and thus it ends up that the larger percentage of 
people pursuing it are people who have both money and time.  This is 
potentially a key driver in the lack of diversity.  Some of the 
literature in co-housing talks of self-selection in creating co-housing, 
but if the seeds of co-housing tend to be rich white liberals, that's 
all you get.

I am also questioning the concept of a fully mixed community as a 
realistic goal.  This may still be systemic racism talking, but I 
currently still feel that humans are still basically tribal in nature, 
and we do seek others like ourselves.  Back when I was in elementary 
school the schools talked about a "melting pot".  I was under the 
impression that this term has gone out of fashion and that we're more 
accurately a "mosaic".  Am I wrong to think this?

Also... thank you for calling me out. I need active help to get pulled 
out of my bubble.

- Lyle

On 2/24/23 4:30 AM, Crystal Farmer 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.
>
> Crystal
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