I have no doubt this exact phrase was uttered hundreds of times in the 1950s by redlining commissions justifying the exclusion of minorities from subdivisions.
That said, reactions here are pretty hyperbolic... jumping to a very extreme conclusion that therefore communal villages are bad.
Every selective admissions process has the potential (probably history) for bigotry. University/school admission, mortgage approval, job hiring. Does that mean selective hiring needs to end?
The same laws apply to everyone, imperfect as they are. illegal discrimination is still illegal. If eco villages start representing a major part of society, and >1% of people live in them, then I am sure that we'll have this discussion. I don't think this is iminent.
There's a very big difference between being rejected from a university, and being expelled from your home because your neighbors dislike you.
I don't see how you make the comparison — the problem we're pointing out is being evicted, not selective admission as you're reframing it to be.
The cause of being expelled, would be that everybody thinks you should be expelled - not that no one 'likes' you. Framing the judgement as resting on private preferences, on likeability, diminishes common humanity which should be generally at large and is crucial to the persistence of any group. A viable community group will include members with tolerance and good judgement who would deny a consensus to expel without good cause. If such qualities are absent (completely so! to enable bad consensus) no amount of individual rights will make up for their absence.
Of course they will. My neighbors can't get me kicked out of my apartment complex, because of my race, no matter how much they want that to happen.
And if my landlord attempts to do that, I might be able to get a big monetary settlement out of it, depending on how many mistakes they make, while going about that.
The same is true in any self-organized community i know of. If anything, it would probably generate an invitation for the complaining neighbors to try and find some better suited place for them to live. That is because the only communities i've visited were very much antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist. And despite all the instances of racism i've seen with my eyes (we are after all, all chidren of one of the most racist countries on earth), i've never seen in a community the kind of racial segregation and hatred i've seen on the streets of big french cities.
I mean, i could imagine some white supremacists setting up a community. But they would not let the rest of us in in the first place, and certainly wouldn't require a consensus to cause harm (whether psychological or physical) to their enemies. In a barbaric society where prison or death sentence are supposed forms of justice, it can appear that excluding someone from a community is simply a matter of personal preferences or bigotry. However, having to part ways with someone because they're harming your community and there doesn't appear to be ways to resolve the problem, is a serious concern that you may have to deal with sooner or later whether you like it or not. But proposing to exclude someone for a trivial matter would instantly raise red flags as an authoritarian manipulation scheme.
Life in a commune is not comparable to life under a nation-state in most regards. Your neighbors in a commune are not just people who happen to live nearby, they're people you live with. And certainly there's no landlord to deal with who have unreasonable power over others :)
Alright cool. So then we agree that communities, democratically or not, should not be allowed by society to just kick people out, based on a "consensus" vote, for all circumstances.
We agree that such communities, should be prevented, using the force of law, from engaging in certain actions, such as kicking people out based on their race, even if it is done democratically.
And we should agree that allowing people to be kicked out, for any reason, is not a feature. Instead it is a bug. Such as if those people democratically kick out certain races.
And this whole argument of "why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you?" is a bad argument, such as in the circumstance of people wanted to kick out people based on race.
And when you ask "what's the alternative?", the alterative is individual rights, that prevent communities from kicking people out of where they live based on race, even if it is democratic.
And the "more humane" way of handling "undesirable" people is a system of individual rights, that prevents communities from kicking people out of where they live, based on characteristics such as race.
Neither does this place. It can only happen by consensus: that is, if everyone agrees. Not some majority, but everyone.
Obviously the question of what were to happen to your shares if you did get kicked out is unanswered, but aside from that, if you want to be able to continue living somewhere where everyone hates you enough that they are all calling for you to get kicked out, then maybe this community isn't for you, you can have that by living basically anywhere else. If you're even a little involved in the community, then it would be pretty difficult to get everyone else to work against you to kick you out. If every one of my neighbours were to conspire against me right now, where the houses are privately owned, I bet they could get me to leave by being hostile enough.
I do agree that a system of individual rights might be a more appropriate model for handling this, but I also don't know their full set of bylaws.
Ok, and if everyone uses a "consensus" to kick someone out, based on race, that should not be allowed, and the government monopoly on violence, should be used to enact legal arrests or fines on those people/communities.
The law should come in, and prevent this group from kicking people out, based on race, even if they have "consensus".
> then maybe this community isn't for you
Maybe communities that are engaging in actions that break individual rights, that are protected by law, should be shut down by the government, or arrested, or fined, for breaking anti-discrimination laws.
Then do you really want to live there? At this point, it becomes important what the rules say happens to your shares if you're kicked out, they did not explain this in the video.
> The law should come in
> that are protected by law
It does. These people aren't above the law. You are free to challenge them in court if you feel your are being discriminated against.
> should be shut down by the government, or arrested, or fined, for breaking anti-discrimination laws.
And if it happens, maybe they would be. Until they actually break the laws, by kicking someone out or otherwise breaking anti-discrimination laws, they haven't broken any laws. You are equating "their internal rules would allow them to" to them actually doing it. They aren't and haven't (she said they've never kicked anyone out and would do it only in extreme cases). So why are you so hung up about something that's never happened? Their internal rules cannot override state or federal anti-discrimination laws and you have the same recourse there as you do anywhere else: you bring them to court for breaking the law.
If that’s not enough guarantee for your comfort then the solution is to not buy a house there. Nobody is forcing anyone to live there, if they’re not comfortable with the community or it’s rules.
No, it is not a good thing for people to be allowed to using illegal discriminatory practices. Such groups should be fined or shutdown by the government legal system.
> Its a privilege to be in the group not a right
Discriminatory practices are banned in many places, and you do not have the right to discriminate based on race, for things like housing, in many places.
Such practices should have the government sent on you, who should hopefully arrest or fine you, for illegal discrimination based on race, and that is a good thing.
> judged unlawful and prosecuted when appropriate by other authorities
Ok and current anti-discrimination laws, that exist in many places, are a good thing, and if they got prosecuted for that illegal behavior, that would be good.
Ok, so then you agree that are current discrimination laws are a good thing, and should be applied even to communes, such as if they discriminate illegally against certain races, even if it was done via "consensus".
Thats what I am talking about, regarding anti-discrimination laws.
Anyway I do wish you the best with your concerns. I do believe prejudging people as little as humanly possible dis/regarding race, class, everything and in carefully focused anti-discrimination laws. But I feel there is considerable danger to do more harm to human relations and attitudes than good, with laws which prosecute too bluntly or frequently between individuals relationships. I think people should resolve differences through the courts as a last resort, as legal justice is very expensive and prone to error. So that would be why I have not been answering your prompts in the affirmative, though they have been stimulating :)
All the best'
My previous reply > I expect it would often be very hard to tell in practice what the eviction is based on, as a community are unlikely to admit - sometimes even to themselves, that their conflict with the 'evictee is rooted in a particular banned prejudice. A common defense and rebuttal for a group accused of kicking someone out over their race - would be that they were aware of their race when they accepted them into the group (!) Perhaps that's why I'm not so alarmed at the possibility of people being uprooted by racists in these communities that you seem to be - where racism is a problem in them it will hardly result in evictions, it will result in barring entry. When you think cynically about what groups of others are capable of, there is no end to villainous possibilities, but others are capable of being better than we ourselves are, as well as worse.
Meanwhile, this also corresponds to reality. In places where planned communities of various sorts exist, there is occasional tension around racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction.
I realise that the possibility of eviction is uneasy for some. If so, don't live there. Meanwhile, 99.9% of actual evictions are in rental context. Sometimes this can happen gated communities. For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people.
As to which is worse... housing, education and employment are all pretty important.
Could that be because the victims of eviction are individuals without the political power of a whole race and its supporters behind them? Obviously evictees are not happy being evicted or they would have left voluntarily.
> For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people.
My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life. Slavery sounds scary too even if it involved the same practical lifestyle as conventional work. Prison sounds scary, yet many people spend all day just sitting at home doing nothing more than they would do in prison anyway. The feeling of freedom is often more important than actually exercising that freedom.
> My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life
Usually, building a free commune is precisely a practical attempt at tackling these issues and not having someone "who can control your life" but collective decision making to empower everyone to the extent possible.
Practical example: some people live a noisy lifestyle, others can't bear noise. You seem to suggest that in a free commune one individual's freedom to make noise would outweigh others' expectations of calm, or the opposite. In practice, a commune would gather feedback from its members and propose to rearrange the disposition of housing so that everyone is happy and comfortable.
Liberal society rests upon the idea that one's individual freedom competes (and stops) with another one's. Anarchist society considers that freedom is not a scarce resource, and one's freedom is complemented by another's. If we take time to study issues as a collective, we can find better solutions for everyone involved.
Collective intelligence is a thing. For example the french government started a "citizens council on ecology" (or whatever would be the translation) where ordinary people spent time with researchers to come up with solutions. And they've come up with a platform for ecology more advanced than even the Green party would dream of. Of course, the government then flushed all those good ideas down the toilet because they're just puppets of the industrial capitalists.
Try to find a realistic interpretation of what I said instead of something so transparently ridiculous. In other words, argue in good faith. There's no point engaging with someone if you try to misunderstand them.
Of course, but communes like that typically don't have a language test to be admitted. There's usually a common set of objectives and rules for the coop that you have to agree with, and that's about it. Sometimes, there's not even a formal interview process or any form of question. You just end up living there because you somehow arrived there, people are friendly and there's place to stay.
That's not to say everyday racism is not a thing in free communes. Who could claim to do away with racism when growing in some of the most racist countries on Earth like USA or France? But autonomous communes like this are usually correlated with other forms of social struggles than simply "enjoying nature", and it's not like these problems can't be faced.
Positive action for admission in squats and communes is not unheard of. It was for example documented in Seth Tobocman's autobiographic "War in the neighborhood" comics about squatting in NYC in the 1980s.
In all honesty, I'm of the opinion that job recruiting should involve an objective "required skills" floor, and then a lottery for all who meet it. It'd been known for some time that hiring is very difficult to do objectively and often has similar outcomes wrt retention as sheer chance. Luck plays a massive role in opportunity and accomplishment, and a systematic acknowledgment of this might do well to readjust people's attitudes towards how professional accomplishment squares with economic dignity.
redlining was a policy of banks. people in a community didn't vote for it. would they, had there been a vote? no one could say, but the point is it wasn't up to them.
so by my reasoning there are fewer vectors for discrimination with a co-op.