Community is HARD; We Build Anyway...
This is a piece I did for the
a few weeks back. I wanted to share it here as well. Enjoy!
One of the questions we constantly get asked here in the Lab is: how can I build community with people I don’t like/don’t like me or with whom I disagree?
We’re always going to share the benefits of community - the way it is necessary for our collective survival - but it’s important for us to be honest about how HARD it is to be in genuine community with others. No matter what our intentions are, we are all human beings which makes us imperfect. And the reality is, we aren’t going to like or be friends with everyone who we are in community with, and that’s ok! So, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the hard stuff of community, so that we can continue to survive the hard stuff of this world, together.
The Challenges are REAL
White fragility and centering: White people in multiracial spaces often unconsciously center their own comfort, learning process, and emotions. They may become defensive when called out, demand extensive emotional labor from BIPOC folks to explain racism gently, or treat the space as their personal anti-racism classroom rather than showing up already prepared.
Performative solidarity: Community-building can become more about appearing progressive than actual redistribution of resources and power. People show up for the photogenic mutual aid event but disappear when it’s time for sustained, unglamorous work or accountability.
Conflict avoidance disguised as “care”: Many spaces confuse niceness with care, avoiding necessary disagreement or accountability because it feels uncomfortable. This often means harm goes unaddressed, ironically, creating less safety for the most marginalized.
Replicating hierarchies: Without intentional practice, communities can reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to resist: who gets heard, who does invisible labor, whose needs are prioritized, who gets to be “complicated” vs. who must be perfect.
Burnout and unsustainability: The most committed people, often those most impacted by systems of harm, carry disproportionate weight while others drift in and out based on convenience.
We also have to acknowledge those who mean well but whose good intentions become their shield against accountability (we often see this with people who hold a mixture of oppressed identities and extremely privileged identities). And how that makes any community space feel fundamentally unsafe even when everyone’s ostensibly committed to community. It can feel really hard to confront these members of our community because it reveals the painful gap between what’s being claimed and what’s actually happening. Most of us believe we are genuinely working as egalitarian community members in these moments, but when confronted with feedback, it is hard to address because we aren’t just navigating behaviors, we are also navigating people’s self-perception.
What makes this so hard to put into words is that it can be death by a thousand cuts. It’s:
The way they talk a little longer than everyone else
How their concerns always somehow become the group’s priority
How disagreeing with them feels riskier than it should
The emotional labor of preemptively softening everything you say
And you can feel the hierarchy even when the structure claims flatness. Your body knows it’s not safe to be fully honest, but you can’t always articulate why in a way that’s accepted as valid.
The key is building with humility and accountability structures already in place, not as afterthoughts. Starting with agreements about how to handle harm, who has decision-making power, how to redistribute resources, how to give and receive feedback. And accepting that you’ll still mess up, because the work is to keep choosing repair over defensiveness. We’re carrying both the truth that we need each other to survive and the reality that some people make survival harder even while claiming community. But, we still build. Why?
Isolation is the state’s goal: Systems of oppression rely on isolation. When we’re disconnected, we’re manageable, exploitable, and convinced change is impossible. Community itself is threatening to power.
Material survival: Mutual aid literally keeps people alive when institutions fail or exclude them. It’s not just symbolic, it’s rent money, meals, childcare, rides to appointments, sanctuary.
Practice ground for different futures: We can’t just theorize liberation - we have to practice relating differently, making decisions collectively, sharing resources, working through conflict. These skills atrophy without use.
Counter-narrative to scarcity: Experiencing tangible interdependence combats the internalized capitalism that tells us we’re alone, everyone’s competition, and there’s never enough.
The challenges themselves require community to address: You can’t learn to navigate whiteness, patriarchy, and other harmful ideologies in multiracial spaces without being in them. You can’t practice disagree-with-care alone. The failures are part of the pedagogy.
Because the alternative is worse: Not building community doesn’t avoid the pitfalls, it just means we face systemic violence isolated and unpracticed. Imperfect community beats perfected individualism.
When I say “community is best for collective survival,” I’m not saying, “Submit yourself to spaces where whiteness dominates” or “Prioritize integration over safety” or “Accept harm for the sake of togetherness”. What I am saying is: interdependence, mutual aid, and collective care are how we survive what’s coming. What’s here.
There are some hard truths to hold here, too. Saying “I need spaces without white people sometimes” or “I need spaces where men aren’t centered” isn’t abandoning community-building. It’s being strategic about what kind of community actually serves collective survival vs. what kind replicates harm with progressive aesthetics. Some people simply aren’t ready for the community they claim to want. Lots of people want the aesthetic of resistance without the discomfort, the feeling of goodness without the redistribution of power, and the credit for showing up without the work of transformation.
Community is essential for survival and that means we have to be intentional about how we build it. It means prioritizing the safety and leadership of the most marginalized. It means accountability before comfort. It means sometimes building in ways that don’t include everyone who wants in, because not everyone is ready to show up in ways that don’t replicate harm.
We’re not lying when we say community is necessary, but hard. We’re just refusing to let ideals of ‘right to comfort’ or others’ lack of collectivist awareness define what community means and why we seek it out. So, despite the challenges and discomfort - we still build. And because we build community, we survive.