community

Well, last night I had a bit of a breakdown at the Ruby Tuesday. No, it wasn’t over the lack of pasta salad at the salad bar (although that would certainly be a cry-worthy situation) it was over my frustration about my community.

A little backstory: Last night, husband and I attended our local community improvement association meeting. Now, because of a previous life endeavor, I have been to a lot of local community associations. Some are far more productive than others, but they all have one common thread: only old people attend community meetings. Additionally, unless a community is overwhelmingly a majority-minority, only white people attend community meetings. That’s not to say that your community meeting isn’t diverse, or that there aren’t community meetings where lots of young people show up, but after attending literally dozens of these things in a few months time, I can conclude that this is true of more meetings than not. Of course, our community meeting was no different. We were literally the youngest people in the room, and the next youngest were my in-laws. This is no exaggeration. Although my community is easily at least 30% African American and has a very noticeable and young Spanish-speaking population (due to the prevalence of Spanish-speaking church services in the area, or vice versa) every single person at this well-attended community meeting was white.

Without going into too much detail, community members vocalized their opinions on issues of illegal immigration, homelessness and class issues, and the gay community (in reference to the recently failed attempt to pass an equal marriage bill in our state’s legislature.) And then, one of our elected officials told us, with a visible eye-roll, that he was sure the “gay community” would be bringing “it” (the bill) back next year. I’m resisting the urge to say anything negative about this person because while I don’t respect his service to our community, he is a friend and so I’ll leave it at that. But the blatant disregard for who supported this bill was appalling. And don’t you worry, everyone had an opinion, whether it was on their face or on their lips.

All of those opinions were racist, intolerant, hateful, and/or ignorant. None of them were related to actually “improving” the community.

I held back tears looking at the faces of people who are grandmas, grandpas, and respected community elders while realizing that they were completely and unashamedly racist. The place I called home was suddenly completely foreign to me.

It’s at this point that I think most young people interested in change find themselves at a crossroads. You can leave and go somewhere young and vibrant that is accepting and open to their entire community, but only adding to the epidemic that young progressives are moving away, or you can stay and try to change the community around you at the risk of living your whole life in those miserable racist conditions and never seeing any improvement.

And so, I cried.

“All these people are so racist and intolerant. I can’t stand it. It’s offensive to me. I’m not proud to call this place home. I don’t want to live here. We can’t change the community. I’m scared you will turn into one of them. I don’t want to be them. We’re not them. I hate it here.”

Husband generally deals with my sobbing over social issues with a fair amount of tact. He understands why I’m upset, but usually doesn’t quite get why I’d cry over it. But husband has recently been in a pretty good mood, so he tried his best to just humor me and prevent it from turning into a scene the rest of the Ruby Tuesday patrons would tweet about.

Obviously, not everyone in my community is racist or intolerant. And obviously, all communities deal with some element of racism no matter how progressive and accepting they are. And to be fair, old people are generally the ones who show up to these kinds of things because they have the freedom to spend time worrying about their community because they’re not working or taking care of young children. But this larger social issue of communities pushing away young progressives in favor of the status quo is not going to resolve itself if people don’t step up and get involved where they live.

Ultimately, I don’t know what we’ll end up doing, staying to fix it or leaving it behind. Right now, though, we live here, and we do what we can. Last night I didn’t have the courage to speak up, but next time I will. And next time my elected official starts running his mouth about the “gay community”, maybe I will take my husband’s advice and run against him.