Hi Don
Thanks for this which was really helpful and most of which I very much agree with. Particularly your views on the role of politics in community action. I think though there is an issue about what sort of politics – the term has been eviscerated down to the notion that politics locally is done by political representatives – Councillors or even community/regeneration workers rather than being “the lynchpin of activity” in the way you describe. This of course is not helped by the tendency of some Councillors and the orthodox political parties that they represent seeing representational politics as somehow more authentic and real (and therefore their own powers as more legitimate) then the involvement that grows from the grassroots through local or interested people’s involvement in what are sometime called “community organizations” . Yes of course such communities do retain the potential to be self-critical and oppositional – at precisely which point they very often lose their funding or are sidelined by the local Town Hall or its inhabitants!
My point was not that we should never use the term “community” but that we should be far more suspicious and alive to our almost ubiquitous use of the term which actually devalues it as a currency. We should use it more judiciously and avoid facile or tautologous uses such as “the local community” when we mean local people or “the black community” when we are thereby lumping together such completely different groups as 3rd generation African Caribbeans, recent arrivals from the Congo or the Horn of Africa and the growing number of mixed race people in the capital. My objection is not to the term “Black” , especially where it is being used (as it was in the 60s and 70s) as a political term, but rather to the notion implied in the term “community” that there is some substrate that unifies and homogenizes black people apart from their collective struggles
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There was a discussion at the ROTA AGM 15/1/08 about the community confusion paper and broad agreement that there was a real issue with the word community which we need to discuss further. John Eversley from London Met University made the point that we need to subvert langauge for our own purposes and not be led into the essentialising and homgenising use of the term community. On the other hand we spoke against the idea of "banning" it - we do need the term for some purposes - when we are doing something active together to challenge power structures. He identified the problem being more with the use of the term community as a noun with "the" in front of it which leads us to think we are describing a state rather than a process or activity.
Other speakers agreed that the term community and allied uses of cohesion take us away from discussions of racism in general and institutional racism in particular.
A further issue which was raised and which needs more development was how the use of the term community (and a critique of it) fits with different notions of identity and identity politics.
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