“All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like. All of us evoke vague notions of community and compassion, yet how many of us went out to find an intimate other, to bring them with us today? So that when we looked around, we wouldn’t just find a similar kind of class, a similar group of people, people like ourselves: a certain kind of exclusivity.
I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice. A lot of white folks can travel all the way to Tibet to experience intimate otherness, but can’t imagine the idea of finding an other in their life right where they are, and saying, “Would you like to come with me?””
―bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, p. 163
