The Illusion of Community: Beyond Shared Identity, Toward Real Connection

We often mistake proximity, shared identity, or spiritual language for true community—but real connection requires more. In this episode, we unpack the illusion of community and explore how unaddressed conflict, power dynamics, and a lack of accountability can create harm even in so-called safe or conscious spaces. Drawing from personal experience and collective observations, we’ll dive into what it actually takes to build communities rooted in trust, repair, and depth. From the Black expat scene in Mexico City to spiritual and nonprofit circles, we explore how to move from performative unity to authentic, transformative relationships. Conflict is not the enemy—silence, avoidance, and spiritual bypassing are. Let’s sh8peshift how we come together.

If this episode resonated with you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your people! Let’s keep the conversation going—connect with me and let me know your biggest takeaway.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Illusion of Community
• 10:16 The Role of Conflict in Community
• 20:41 Assessing Shared Values in Community
• 30:51 Restorative Practices and Community Healing

Transcript

Welcome back, Shapeshifters. So today we're going to talk about the illusion of community. And this is something I've been wanting to talk about for a really, really long time. But recently there was this incident in one of the WhatsApp communities here in Mexico City of a black WhatsApp community. And essentially there were two people that were in this community who had a disagreement and one person felt like harm had been committed to them and they didn't have a forum to express this harm, let alone have a place to address it, hold the other person accountable and repair it. And it really made me think about all of these communities, communities, I'm putting that in air quotes if you can't see me, that I've been in and really questioning what is community, right? This community just based on affiliation, like y'all are all in the same community because you're from the same city, or you're all in the same community because you share racial identity or sexual identity or you have similar interests, does that in effect make you community with someone? And if so, what does that community's responsibility to maintaining the safety of that community and for addressing harms? And so this is something that I have seen play out in spiritual communities that I'm part of like IFA and quote unquote conscious black communities in these wellness spaces, definitely in the nonprofit industrial complex. If you do any type of liberation work, social justice work, sometimes I think social justice work can be extremely dangerous because often there is no space for the harm to get addressed. Even amongst black women, circles that I've been in with people that look like me, right? And so I think part of evolving and part of us moving forward as a people and as a planet is to have a candid conversation about community, a candid conversation about the myth of community versus the reality of community. And I think the myth is that shared identity creates shared values, right? The reality is without structure, without intention, without tools and practices and practicing the practice before you actually commit the harm. Community is more than just a bunch of traits. And I think in ancient times, because communities had a container that held them, they had a spiritual form, they had certain values, they had certain practices that weren't just stated, that were also held together by festivals, rites of passage, initiation practices, councils of elders, rules of law, forums to mediate and deal with issues as they come up. And unfortunately, one of the imprints of living under patriarchy and white psychosis is that the systems that have been built to protect us, particularly if you are of color, you carry a womb, you live an identity that is not a white, heterosexual, able-bodied male, we see historically many of the systems that are supposed to keep us safe actually can be extremely dangerous. can't just call the police and know that the police are going to have our best interests at heart. We can't necessarily go to school systems and know that they necessarily have black children, young people of color's interests at hand. We know that if you do not live a heteronormative experience, that there are many spaces that are not safe. So if we can't call the police, if we don't believe in the judicial system is actually being something that rehabilitates people because we see the fact that folks who enter into the system never get rehabilitated and they're more likely to commit crimes, then how do we actually address levels of harm? So I want to talk about some of the harms, extreme levels of gossip, where you have people that are in communities and one person is talking about the other person, maybe an incident has happened, they're kind of n riling their crew up. There's their faction of community and the other person is trying to defend themselves But they've never actually talked to the person that's accused them They just heard it from the grapevine and so now they're having another side conversation and they're rallying up their faction and now you got factions beefing But people aren't talking to each other now when there's an event this person isn't allowed to the event because such-and-such had a problem with them, but that's and such a problem. Is that really your problem? Do we even know that your problem was a real problem? Do we even create space to talk about the problem? And people get excluded. Also, this idea of spiritual bypassing, where you have spiritual leaders who have the level of power and privilege. There are people who are in positions of authority in the church, in the temple, a mosque, and they take advantage of their authority through sexual abuse money gouging and taking advantage of people who literally are coming to you for spiritual service. So we know that people in a vulnerable state, they're trusting their spiritual guide. And again, when something happens, who do they go to? How do they separate the spiritual teaching and learning that they're receiving? Where sometimes these people of authority have a lot of great attributes, but there's also this other side of them and their character, right? I've also seen this show up in the weaponization of identity politics where people weaponize their sexual identity, racial identity, positionality, what region they've come from. I've seen this played out on myself in work spaces. One incident that I had when I was an organizational leader, I was supervising staff and all of those staff were weaponizing my black woman-ness against me to turn me into the angry black women. Male staff who had never historically, culturally, or anywhere in their family because of their identity had never seen a black woman, let alone had to take advice and counsel from a black woman in a position of power. And so because there was an issue around that, that was then weaponized against me. And unfortunately, once people put you into that box, it's really difficult to come out of it because then...Everything that you do, they're just going to refer back. Well, see, I told you, I told you she was angry. See how she's acting. We've seen communities where there is a failure to address actual harm. There's fragmentation. Sometimes communities completely blow up. Organizations completely blow up. Collectives, relationships completely blow up because two individuals had a problem that was never resolved or it can isolate and force other people out. And unfortunately, we live in such a cancel culture and we haven't built the practice and we don't have safe and supportive containers to resolve and address conflicts. And it's so much easier to cancel and call someone out than to actually sit in the fire, to sit in the room, to do the work, to see if there's a level to address it. Also living in a social media age creates challenges because it's so much easier to go to social media or an online forum than it is to look someone in the eye, to sit someone down. There's things that we may feel comfortable saying online that we wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable saying face to face. We wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable saying in person. There's a level of anonymity sometimes that allows people to get canceled in virtual spaces. And so I do believe that virtual spaces have widened the gap around one, the illusion of community because we think we're part of these online communities, but also how fragile community is. That the reality is community is something that we have to continuously nourish. It is a garden. Community is a relationship. Just like you're in relationship with self. Just like you're in relationship with your partner, with your family, you also have to be in relationship with community. And so that means, as we learn from ancient Kemet, the glyph for relationship was not the heart, it was the plow. It reminds us that relationships are gardens and gardens need to be toiled. They need to be weeded. They need to be planted. They need the right nutrients. We have to give and put effort into maintaining, nurturing, cultivating the garden of the relationships, the types of relationships that we really want to have, not just for ourselves, so that those relationships can bear fruit. And so in the bearing of fruit, we will be able to reap the benefits for ourselves. And that is why indigenous communities had so many embedded structures in place that allowed checks and balances. The original checks and balance system in ancient African civilization was the balance of the elders with the ruler as well as the priests. That was the original checks and balance system that capitalism and democracy of the president and the judicial, all of that came from, it came from ancient African society. And so even though you may see the king on the throne, you don't realize that the king has to be vetted by the elders, that divination is performed by the priest to make sure that he or she has the divine authority in order to be a ruler and that they're always in communication and in relationship with each other. We see this even in the Yoruba tradition to this day of Ifa when we talk about the Iyami, the Iyami as those who were mislabeled as witches, but we know that that is not a word in Yoruba. That was a word brought by Europeans and that in fact they were wise women. They have the power to bring life. They have the power to bring death. They have their own sacrifices that have to be made. And it doesn't matter if you're right with yourself. You can be right with the Orisha. If you are not right with them, then you're out of order. And so even we learn in Ifah that we have to be in relationship with all of these different places of authority. These places of authority hold us into a place of accountability because there's a system in place.

We know that community is also a currency. Then when we look at the future of where we are going in the planet, that it is going to be your community, your true, true community that is going to support you when maybe you can't rely on the federal government or maybe you cannot rely on your job. It will be the kindness of people in your community who, God forbid, you get sick or come down on a level of financial hardship or need someone to watch your children or need a place to stay. We really see the currency of community and how it is continuously playing out, particularly in this post-COVID era. And this is why ancient communities built their actual homes in a compound. They built them in a place where people were naturally part of the design because they understood that without people, you would not be able to exist and so there's that part of us, that human part of us that wants to connect, that wants to be social, that wants to be part of a family unit. That's why we recreate family units wherever we go, even if it's dysfunctional family. A lot of times we're creating family, but we're creating dysfunctional family dynamics. But the reality is we're yearning. We're yearning for social interaction, especially now when we are now isolated. And that makes it even more difficult with the with technology and the isolation that technology brings, it makes it more difficult for us to come together and be in community. And so there's things that we can do online and it's beautiful, but there's something to be said to sit in sacred circle with someone. There's something to be said to be able to look someone in the eye. There's something to be said to be in prayer in person when you come together and you raise the vibrational frequencies of multiple people touching and agreeing. There's work that you can only be done in person. And in order for us to do that work, we have to have safe spaces. And so how do we move beyond identity politics, beyond shared interests? How do we move beyond affiliation and proximity to actual real community? And so one of the things that you may or not know, in addition to the fact that I've had many instances of community harm and repair and restoration, I also run an amazing cooperative in Oakland, California called Black Space Cooperative. Check us out online. We support black led organizations in maintaining cultural permanence. And so this is something that I'm really passionate about. I'm passionate about number one, different economic models beyond for-profits, beyond nonprofits, looking at cooperative models, how we really can come together and practice community care. But once we say it, right, we love to throw out cooperative, collective, non-hierarchical. It's real cute. The buzzwords are real cute. But the two things that I've learned in this work that will allow communities to implode, implode over and over and over. We don't have a shared way of being together and we don't actually trust one another when conflict arises because it will arise and that's the other part of community. Just like we have to be out tending the fertile soil of our garden, we also have to know that tension and conflict is heart of life. It doesn't mean that it's a negative thing. And unfortunately, we're so oversensitive and we're raising a population of children that are so overly sensitive. And I don't mean being sensitive to spirit and being tapped into, you know, source. No, mean, oversensitive to critique, oversensitive to, you know what? Yeah, you didn't win. You didn't make it first place and you don't get a prize. You got in last and maybe that'll make you work harder next time. Oversensitive, we don't want to give them grades. Everybody just gets the pass. Oversensitive, everyone has to be included. When we do that, we rob ourselves and our children of the opportunity to truly grow the grit that is going to allow them to build confidence because we become so conflict averse as if it's not part of life that as soon as there's discomfort, we're ready to cancel.

We're ready to withdraw. ready to remove ourselves. And so part of this is an opportunity for us to do some self-reflection. What is your default when conflict arises? Because again, we love to look at the news and tell the government how they need to be addressing conflict but how many of us have conflict in our households right now? How many of us have conflicts in our families right now? How many of us have conflicts with work right now? How many of us have conflicts with a friend right now? But we expect the government to be able to resolve conflict, and we can't even resolve conflict in our own home. And I'm going tell you, if you can't take care of your household, you don't get to speak on other people's conflict. You have to actually walk the walk. So having the level of self observation within ourselves to understand clearly, do I default into withdrawal and retreat when conflict arises? Do I default into I'm the victim? Do I default into I have to fix this? I have to fix this. I'm the one to fix it. Doesn't matter if the problem is happening with two people in my community. I'm taking this all on my shoulders and as it's something to be fixed. What is your default place that you go to when conflict arises? And so when we are able to name that and have the self-awareness around it, then you can manage it. Then you can create a set of care tools around how to support you. So when you know that you're going to go into conflict or when a conflict arises, you've already got the tools in your toolbox. You already know the playlist. You already know the breath work. You already know how you got to talk yourself before you go into it. You can start managing and lessening the level of anxiety. And the more we do that, the more we build that actual muscles to be able to address conflict in real time. So how do we do better? How do we move and create transformative approaches to healing and accountability? Well, the first one I already told you, the first one is knowing what your default is in times of conflict.

And how can you create your own restorative care kit of practices to support you? And that's on an individual level, because again, no one is responsible for your happiness. No one is responsible for your mood. You are responsible for that. And so it is up to each and every one of us to be able to manage what is going on with us. That does not mean that harm doesn't occur and we don't need to get to feel some type of way, but the person who has agency and power to truly transform that first and foremost is going to be you. So as we are able to do that within ourselves, then we are able to move out into our community and see, okay, first let me do an audit of my community. What are the values that I hold within myself and do the individuals in my community reflect those values? Now look, we're all living in this matrix. So I know sometimes we gotta do stuff, we gotta work for people, we gotta get that bag.

And you know, as long as we're not killing anybody or harming anyone outrightly, obviously just living in a capitalistic world, we're all creating harm. Every one of us can point to something in our home, probably that we're even wearing right now that contributed to harm on the planet. So let's not act like we're not harming people. We are all complicit in capitalism. However, when it comes to just your day to day, do the people around you reflect your values?

And this audit isn't something about do they have the potential? This is not about if they have the potential to reflect your values. This is about today. Do they share your values? Yes or no. And it's not about what people say. It's about how they move. You don't have to tell me how much you value your body. I can look at what you put in your body, who's around your body, how you're nourishing your body, how you're clothing your body, washing your body, working your body out.

That's how you value your body. I can look at how you value money by the way that you treat money, by the way you talk about money, by the way that the money is sitting in your pocket or your wallet. Right. I can look at the way that you value space by walking into your space, by looking at your home. Many of you could look around your home right now and you could get a sense of what you are truly valuing. So value is not based on potential. Now, does that mean people can't build up?

Absolutely. But if we're doing an audit today, we want to take them where they're at today. We want to know who are the people in our lives who share our values. And you know, there was a moment, I think for many of us in this kind of post-COVID era where we went from not seeing a lot of people because we were all shut down on lockdown. And then, you know, we started seeing people again. And it was kind of like an opportunity like, well, just because I was seeing you before COVID.

Do I really want to see you after? Am I seeing you now because I was seeing you before? But maybe you've grown, maybe you've evolved, maybe they've grown, maybe they've evolved. Just because you've known someone for a long time doesn't mean that you're always still sharing the same values with them and that they get to continue being in your community. Because again, community is something that you are going to be nurturing in your own garden. Community requires work.

So you have to assess, is this a relationship where there is a shared reciprocity of work and the cultivation of what we're building together, or is this one-sided? If we're all coming to the garden to do work on a Saturday and you're coming with the values of reciprocity and this other person is coming with the value of scarcity, how are they going to show up in that garden? You're going to be giving away the fruits and they're going to be trying to take them for themselves.

So you are not going to be able to cultivate a shared garden with these people. So that is why knowing your values and really assessing if the people around you share those values. Now, how does that look when it comes to collectives, organizations, WhatsApp groups? It can be something as simple as community agreements, points of unity. We don't have to agree on everything, right? And here's the shadow. I don't want anyone to walk away from this episode and go overboard on we have to agree on every single thing and get down the same way and listen to the same music. No, we don't have to agree on every single thing. What are the things that we do need to agree on for you to be my friend? Right? What are the things we do need to agree on for you to be my partner? What are the things we do need to agree on if we're saying we do liberatory work or social justice work or whatever it is? What are the points of unity that bring us together?

We see this in the Black Panther Party's 10-point platform. We see this in the Nation of Islam, and we see this with Marcus Garvey. And all of these organizations, and the reason why I name those specifically is because if you look at the history of Black American radicalism in America, those were the most successful social movements in our history. And why were they successful? Because they all had shared unity, shared ideology whether you agree with it or not, they all had shared values and ways that they came together. Even if they broke those values, and we are going to talk about that, but we have to have some shared points of interest, not only in what we look like in our identity politics, but how we move, how we respond, how we engage, how we interact. What is acceptable and what is unacceptable behavior? And what are the consequences for someone stepping out? That doesn't mean we banish them outright, but we need to have clear consequences. So then when people enter your community, they then have agency. They can say, you know what? I do agree with this or I don't agree with this. But if you have this loosey goosey community over all black and then something pops off because again, we know it's going to pop off because that's just life. Now we're scrambling around and realizing, actually we don't share the same values. Actually, the way that you feel that we need to resolve the situation is completely different and completely actually against the way that I feel that we should solve the situation. So giving each other agency by having shared language, shared values, and a shared container, whether it's points of unity or community agreements, with consequences of how we are going to interact. And again, like I said, you can have all the agreements, you can have all the points of unity, we can look back to those same examples that I gave you, the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and Marcus Garvey's work, and we can see that even with points of unity, harm was still committed within all of those movements. So we're not going to sugarcoat history. We know that there were harms against women. We know that there were power dynamics. We know that there were people who were espousing one type of way of being, and they were living a whole different way. So then what do we do? Well, the first thing is we have to be trained in how to communicate. This is another thing, even when harm comes up so often, we don't learn in this society how to communicate, nonviolent communication, how to really talk and speak from your heart, how to hold space for each other, how to reflect back to a place of being in deep listening, not just being in combative mode.

The way that we're trained to communicate in this society is by debating, is by arguing, is by bullying. You know, I know for me, if you've ever grown up in like a black classroom, you got haze, you know, you had to be able to like, we call it a cap in on each other, you know, you had to be able to defend yourself verbally. And so that becomes the way that we communicate. A lot of the way that our parents communicated to us was very harsh. know for me, I got spoke to very harshly and that was just normal. So even when we talk about communicating, we have to unpack, unlearn and create new ways of expanding our awareness of what it even means to communicate. Do we even know how to communicate your feelings? So often when you even press the mic to someone to communicate, unfortunately people don't even have the words and that practicing of communication has to happen before the incident occurs. So the more that we can role play, right? Role playing with yourself, role playing with your partner, role playing with your coworkers. Hey, here's some of the things that we've seen not go so well in our organization. Here's things we've seen happen in community. Here's something we've seen other people fail from. Let's role play that and let's use a nonviolent communication technique. Let's sit in a place of discomfort now when it's pretty much a low threshold. So when it's something that really is important and that's real and that matters, we already have that muscle. And unfortunately, a lot of times, not only do we not have the skills and support for communication and the practice, we then go into crisis mode. We haven't put in the community agreements. We don't have shared unity. The harm pops off. And now we go to 10 or we go to 100 because often these so-called communities already are full of traumatized people. And when I say that, ask us, we're all traumatized. We are all to a certain level living in this society traumatized. So we've already come into community harmed. We've already come into community where we've maybe been looked over feel unseen. Then we bring that baggage into the quote unquote new community, mimicking the family that we're trying to recreate, thinking that it's going to then save us only to realize that we're now acting out the same co-dependence and toxicity in our families, in our work, in our relationships, in our home. So that is why nonviolent communication is so critical. And not just talking to talk, to then because we have consequences, right, around our community agreements and points of unity. We then can move into, okay, so what do we do? Do we give these two individuals the opportunity to talk one on one with an observer? Do we bring in a mediator? Is there a trusted elder? Is there a panel of trusted people? Who are the people who have the integrity to be able to truly hold space? Who are the space holders in our community? I know that I have been called on numerous times to be a spaceholder in community, to be a trusted community member for people to say, hey, we're going through this. We just need you to hold space to sit in the room to help us mediate because we trust you. We think that you'll be objective in helping us move to resolution. And so really having those restorative justice practices in place so that we don't only have to default to the police, to the prison system now does that mean that there are not times for the authorities? I am not saying that at all. It really depends on what the level of harm is. And so each instant is going to be different. And that's why your community has to create the container that's going to be able to address the types of harms that you know are going to happen because they're already happening. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just design for what is already occurring, what we've seen occur, what the trends are, or what could potentially occur and having some restorative justice practices in where we have places to name harm, to move into places of healing, to not just move to a level of exile, but to truly move into repair. And repair doesn't mean that it's easy for the person that committed the harm. Repair might mean you need to step back. Repair might mean you need to take, go to counseling. Repair might mean you need to pay a fine. You get to decide as part of your community of what that really entails. So I'm no way saying that it should be easy and feel good. There's the universal law of karma for all the energy that you put out in the world. You are going to receive that equal level of energy, even if it's transformed through another medium. So you're going to reap what you sow. Now doesn't mean it always has to be from a place of punishment, but the punishment should fit the crime, if you will. The punishment should fit the harm, but also being patient and humble with ourselves to understand that we're all coming in with a level of trauma, a level of brokenness that we're working to repair. None of us is perfect. Harm is going to occur and we get to create the safe space of what that looks like. One thing I want to say about restorative justice, and this is from people who work in restorative justice, who do this work, who have trained me, who I've had the opportunity to learn under, everything can be resolved. The resolution may be separation. You can't put a shiny bow on everything. I've seen more harm created in communities because people refuse to just take the split, make the break, make the cut on individuals' behaviors and personality types that are literally contributing the harm because it's like, but we don't want them to not be part of it. Well, why? If this person is against our values and they're creating more harm, you can't allow that person to just wreak havoc. Because one, it sets the tone for everyone else in community that basically all these agreements don't mean anything because this person clearly isn't holding them. And then the work that you're claiming to do as a community can't move forward because you're not aligned. And how many times have we seen that breakdown because we're refusing to just understand that resolution sometimes looks like this person and this person cannot be in the same room, cannot work together, and that's okay. So that allows us to move into a place of practice, a place of reflection over a place of perfection, to know that this work is ongoing, it is a community practice.
We make the room for people to grow, but we also design and set ourselves up for success. And now more than ever, as we are living in the most transformational time on our planet, true community is about people that are gonna grow with you, people that are gonna repair with you, people that are gonna be responsible with you. And that's what this path is calling us to do, to build new structures, to create the new earth that is going to allow us to build spaces that reflect our values and that don't reflect our trauma. So many of these so-called liberatory spaces are literally microcosms of the same macrocosms that we claim to be fighting against. And so instead, we've been harmed in white spaces, so we just create black spaces to harm each other. We've been claimed, we've been harmed in heteronormative spaces, so now we just create queer spaces to harm each other. The harm is still going on And so it is through our own level of self-awareness, it is through our own sense of our values, aligning with other like-minded individuals, doing the internal work to build up our communication strategies, build up our tools, have realistic expectations and conversations that are going to allow us to dream and to design new ways of being together that are able to hold complexity, hold truth, hold love and hold liberation. And that is what we're here for, shapeshifters. As I said before, community is currency. By having that currency of community, you're going to be able to take it to the marketplace. You're going to be able to take it to the bank. And as we watch other structures, false structures fall, that real community that you've built will be a value add that you have an investment portfolio that you will continue to reap the dividends of for years and years to come. And this might seem morbid, but it's actually not. Think about someone in your family or someone in your community and you saw their funeral. And even though it was sad because that person was transitioning, you saw the amount of people that they touched, the amount of people that you didn't even maybe know about that came to just pay their respects because in some way that person touched their lives. To me, that's true wealth. True wealth is when you get to transition into the ancestor realm and so many people are gathered together to send you off into that realm to speak prayers upon your name, to speak words of affirmation upon who you are, that whether they're your children that came out of your womb and your own bloodline or children that you've adopted in community, you have so many people that support you that are moving your work forward that even when you're not here, that culture of community is still paying dividends. Community even transcends our physical body. And how many of us right now are beneficiaries of the community of someone in our bloodline that maybe knew your grandmother, knew your father, knew a cousin, knew an aunt, knew someone that you were in relationship with. And because you were in community with that person is like, you know what? I don't even know you, but I know you cool with that person. And if you go with them, you call it me. The dividends still pay off. So we are going to move beyond illusion and into real community in 2025 and beyond. All right. That's what I got for you today. Shapeshifters until next time. Keep shifting.