From Rob Gregg Dean of Arts and Humanities, Richard Stockton College, New Jersey.
In reply to the community Confusions discussion paper:

Actually, a lot of the issues you raised are ones that have concerned me over the years — particularly in my earlier guise as an African-Americanist (both in my book on African American migration and my on-line book about migration more generally). Two things occur to me, off the top of my head — I believe there are a lot of other things in there (just thought of a third).1) There’s a degree to which I wonder whether the notion of community can ever be simply the positive attributes as opposed to the negative ones — i.e. Radical rather than reactionary. As a force for change for bringing people on the outs into power, or of increasing the power they might have, then it surely takes on a more progressive aspect. But, while it is doing this, it is nonetheless also (simultaenously) manifesting the reactionary part in its very definition. It is creating “fictions” about the community and inventing histories of its nature in order to mobilize people, and in so doing it is silencing (to borrow from Trouillot — Silencing the Past) narratives that hinder such mobilization — aspects of differentiation, class, gender, color, age, etc., that might fragment the “community” from within. As such, community can be turned into (or realize) its more reactionary form by its own success and the establishment of community institutions that entrench elements who then jealously guard their privileges (either from internal threats, or new external ones — i.e., newer immigrants); or it might realize this form through increased pressure from without and its lack of “success” to gain power (one of the things that I argued in my first book was that increased segregation of African American communities led to increased fragmentation and inability to unite in opposition to oppression — contra the Marxist assumption, I suppose). So in terms of a synchronic scheme the division in your definition works, but as soon as movement occurs both elements of community are always present — making it such a hot potato politically.2) Related to this, your passive/active dichotomy is something that I was wondering about. I think this dichotomy serves an important purpose to get us beyond old sociological (Toennies — gemeinschaft and gesselschaft and all that) notions of community that place it in a modernization framework of community (passive and traditional) and society (active and modern). Clearly community is always more active than this old theory suggested, but I wonder if it is ever really passive. In other words, there are things that people did in the past, but are they really expressions of “community” and “culture” until they are no more, or are, in a way, threatened with extinction, at which point they become actively created and invented. Is this what Anderson is talking about in Imagined Communities? Again, this means that community is never simply a reflection of a historical reality (though this will be the claim), but is instead a political intervention made for other purposes. It either becomes the reactionary claim keeping certain people in line (e.g., immigrants to the United States who frequently repressed advances for women in their communities because such things would threaten the ethnic group and would be mark it as potentially dysfunctional), or it becomes an argument for blaming the victim for claiming that the reason that others have failed to adapt/assimilate, etc. is because of the nature of their community (i.e., that it is dysfunctional and attempting now to help it would be “throwing money at the problem”).3) I loved your description of the community organizations of the 1980s and it reminded me of the impact of money that was put into American cities in the 1960s (the Great Society) and the impact it had on inner city African American communities. What such community organizations tended to do — better funded as they were with better resources than other local, community groupings — was move people out of their churches and other such places into the community/recreational centers. This was fine until all the money ran out (Vietnam war/OPEC) and the communities were left with neither the rec centers nor their own organizations, at which point others could then say that the problem with them was that they were weak communities (dysfunctional) and so should be written off — thus the Great Society ironically ended up weakening the position of many. Which reminds me — I hope you have been watching The Wire — definitely the best show ever produced on American tv.

Rob Gregg (Dean of Arts and Humanities) Richard Stockton College, New Jersey