What Does Your Community Look Like?

Last week, on the blog Racialicious, Latoya Jackson posted an open thread, asking readers to comment on her question What Does Your Community Look Like? I wasn't going to respond to it, but it wasn't because I'm not interested. It's more that I wasn't willing to examine myself, to put my communities and socializing under a microscope like that. Because who knows what I might discover; or worse - what I might overlook.

I go through stages in my community-building. At times, I lay back and hope that relationships will happen to me. Usually though, I find that I can't quite get what I need out of these interactions: probing conversations, the intelligent give-and-take, intellectual intercourse, as Alanis Morisette put it, I believe. This is when I end up feeling stagnant, lonely, and resentful of other people and their communities. This is when I end up going out and seeking communities.

It's hard, especially in Milwaukee, I've found. Because this city is too big to be small-town, and too little to be big-city. Because it's hard to break people out of the segregated barriers that are so distinctly drawn here. Because Milwaukee is such an odd mixture of Midwestern friendliness and frontier-town suspicion. A lot of times, (and I'm guilty of this as well) you'll meet someone and really hit it off, and maybe even exchange contact information, but because hanging out with that person would require a complete redefinition of our community-based identities, these potential relationships fizzle out. Too often, I think, we let our communities define who we are and who we'll grant our time. Yes? No?

So, what does my community look like? Distressingly small, usually.

Until last month, a large component of my commuity included, or centered around, my mom. With her, my 57 year old, Midwestern WASP of a mama, I bought groceries, perused fabric stores, frequented restaurants. This part of my community was tiny, including at most my mom, my sister and me. We saw many people, but didn't interact with them much. Insular but dynamic. But my mom has moved to St. Louis recently, and this part of my community doesn't exist anymore, not the least of which because I cannot afford to do some of these things without her financial assistance.

So I've been feeling isolated, broke and lonely. Lacking community. And lacking a community by which to define myself. The lost, post-college, 20-something period of my life in full swing.

At work, my community is an odd one. Non-profit offices always have a strange make-up. My boss is a 60-something Jewish woman, and her relative equal (the only permanent male in the office) is a 40ish southerner. Working down in building stories and seniority, there is my immediate superior, who is maybe 30, married, with a recent baby, white and from Texas. There is a half-Jamaican, half-Salvadorian 20-something, a Greek 20-something, two African American 20-somethings, me (a biracial 20-something), a 60-something white Midwesterner, a 30-something white Midwesterner, and that's about it. We're a pretty feisty and nerdy group (music dorks, every one), with a huge satellite of children who we serve as music educators and administrators, professional musicians and music teachers, wealthy board members and donors, and all the other expected non-profit usuals. I eat my lunches with the two girls closest to me in age and situation, but have yet to spend much time with them socially outside of the office. There is a barrier there; we may get along at work, but would we get along with each other's friends? I have yet to find out, and that bothers me.

My roommate is multiracial, and she and I have been friends for many years. I have excused myself from her community of friends, however, because it's largely Academic and small-town White, two things that make me profoundly uncomfortable because of a feeling of being constantly at odds with their views. My sister's community is more diverse in sexual orientation than my own and that of my roommate, but that is her community, one that, again, I just don't feel completely comfortable in. So, my own? My own community outside of work? I've been seeing a musician, who is 6 years my elder, and Mexican; and he knows everyone, it seems, in the world. Through him I have met a great many people, mostly musicians, mostly people of color, diverse in gender, race, sexual orientation, but perhaps unsurprisingly, not in occupation.

My neighborhood is one of the most diverse ones in the city, with many mixed couples, people from wealthy and middle class and low-income backgrounds, people from all over the spectrum, and when I go to a public events in the neighborhood, I'm always delighted to see all the different kinds of people. But this is the hardest thing for me to accept in my community. Because people seem to talk up Riverwest as a Utopia, and I have never trusted a Utopia. Because Riverwest may look pretty awesome and colorful, but it's terribly impermanent, almost like a college campus; it's like everyone's passing through. Which means that everything has the potential to change, and nothing seems to last, including friendships, initiatives, businesses. I don't know, I may be terribly wrong here; I'm still investigating this place I love to hate.

I don't know yet how I would define my community, or how my community would define me (and sometimes I think the latter is the question that obsesses me the most). For the Midwest, I would say it's fairly diverse, but it's also fairly hypocritical, just like the Midwest. It drives me crazy, for good and for bad.