The Difference Between Community and Friends

And how this treats (or repeats) systems of oppression.

In times and cultures such as ours where isolationism is the poisoned pond into which we’re born and told it’s pristine, admirable even; when our deep desires for connection and suspicions that this system is likely not the best we can do are ignored or derided, we are desperate for not only change but relationships.

The two things that most directly address these needs are community and friendships, respectively. In my podcast Radical Nuance, I often quip about how there’s rarely a binary to any situation that isn’t computer code, and this is no different. AND I also think it’s important that we disabuse ourselves of the idea that community and friends are synonyms rather than overlapping but separate concepts.

Community is a concept that brings people together for the purposes of mutual aid, of building alternatives to the shitheap of a system we find ourselves in, and of fighting the architects of our collective oppression. The people of and in a community may absolutely be friends, sometimes the best of friends, but they aren’t necessarily friends at all.

Friends (and I’m using this term broadly and deeply, not in a shallow social media kinda way) are people with whom you feel totally safe, with whom you can be your true and messy self, with whom you feel fully seen and accepted. Some of these folks may be in community with you as well, but not necessarily.

Community and friends are here for the good times, the bad times but in different ways. To oversimplify for the sake of brevity, friends are here to celebrate, grieve and in-between the most intimate moments of our time in this wild place. They are here to be with, to build and nurture the you that is the most fragile, the most sacred, and the most secret.

Community is here to stitch together that which the very founding of this nation has torn asunder: the mutualistic drive of humanity to help each other thrive. This means a lot of good times, i.e. community gardening days, a protest (aka parade) or two, movie nights or book clubs for political ed, etc. This also means a lot of bad times: well, I mean you don’t need me to tell you that we live in a capitalist, colonialist, white supremacist empire falling in on itself in the most horrific yet almost comically dumbass ways imaginable.

In short, friends are for the soul, community is for the external conditions that allow that soul to thrive.

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To quote Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in their brilliant piece How Much Discomfort is the Whole World Worth?:

“…organizing on the scale that our struggles demand means finding common ground with a broad spectrum of people, many of whom we would never otherwise interact with, and building a shared practice of politics in the pursuit of more just outcomes. It’s a process that can bring us into the company of people who share our beliefs quite explicitly, but to create movements, rather than clubhouses, we need to engage with people with whom we do not fully identify and may even dislike.”

Community building is not a mission to build those clubhouses. It is a mission to change the lived experiences that define our oppression, and that requires a lot of uncomfortable meetings, awkward encounters, accountability, humility, and learning pains. This doesn’t mean of course that we take shit from everyone and anyone, that we make our community spaces an open field day for abuse (from community members or state agents). Lack of comfort isn’t the same as lack of safety. Rather, it means that the door is open to those who want to come in. It means that traumas and personalities will clash, feathers will ruffle, fuck ups are ok, failings are welcomed, accountability is mandatory, and friendship is not. It means that we have to build systems to address things like abusers, state agents or other infiltrators that don’t replicate the abuse of systems we’re trying to topple. How exactly those systems are constructed and how that accountability is practiced depends on the people and place, and admittedly, as Kamau Franklin put it in a recent interview with me, “the left sucks at it.”

And I think one of the reasons the left sucks at it so much as is that we conflate community with friends. We expect people to either walk through the door politically polished according to our own ideas and standards or we expect their failings and fuck ups to be so small as to not require real deep dives into accountability. When they’re not, we feel betrayed - a betrayal that should not be in most community member’s power to deliver.

So, we build walls around a group of friends and call it security, copying and pasting the walls which surround our land of the free. We tether ourselves to ideologies and call it liberatory praxis. We discard people over suspicions, over political “impurities” or for acting in ways that their lived experiences and trauma couldn’t help but manifest. We decide, mostly subconsciously, that really the world isn’t worth discomfort - outside of the already existing discomfort of living in it.

We become a grotesque mirror of the world in which we live, spinning our wheels, kvetching in circles to people who already agree with us while we load our guns to sit in circular firing squads. These practices do not create community, and ultimately they do a pretty damn good job of breaking up friendships.

In other words, this conflation isn’t just about language. It’s about how we see each other, how we see ourselves, and how we perceive and treat (or repeat) the system that has separated us violently from both community and friends.