Open Thread: What Does Your Community Look Like?

by Latoya Peterson

So, now I am curious. When I made a comment about my life being one big PoC party on this thread, I got back a response that I didn’t anticipate. A few people (on the thread and on BFPs thread) expressed the desire to belong to a PoC community in real life.

I admit, my first thought was “What’s stopping you?”

Then, after I thought about it, region plays a large role. But other things do as well. My friends are fairly diverse, but we are tied by some common threads. A lot of my friends I met in the open mic/art gallery scene in DC. Others I came by through getting into dance and yoga. A couple of them, I met on the internet – I was trying to locate other girl gamers in my area, but I ended up finding a couple comics fans to boot. Most of the people I met where other PoCs, not sure how pre-exisiting selection biases factored in with that one.

My community became diverse on its own – South MoCo is where the minorities are, generally speaking. I recall being one of a handful of brown kids in kindergarten – by the time I hit middle school, the schools in my area were majority-minority. The neighborhoods have kept that mix, even as gentrification is sweeping through my area. And work was kind of an accident – I wasn’t aware the office was predominantly black before I began the job.

However, that has me wondering about you, dear readers. What do your communities look like? (And feel free to divide your communities into friends and work, or home life and social life, whatever.)