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Platform : What Is the Meaning of ‘Community’?

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REV. FISHER J. ROBINSON

Vicar, African American Catholic Community and African Diaspora, Archdiocese of Los Angeles

In African American tradition all things are usually done as a community or with reference to the community. We have great respect of ancestors or the elderly, those who have gone before us, leaders who are role models who keep the community together and are looked up to.

When we speak of the church community, it is made up of many parts--there are many ethnic groups. And one of the things we recognize and appreciate is that each group brings an added dimension to the community. They bring their traditions, their values. There’s something good in each. We seek to appreciate, to value and to understand those; to see what similarities there are in each.

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That’s what we seek in the parish community and also in the greater community; and that’s based on the Gospel which we are called upon to proclaim, called to live.

SALAM AL-MARAYATI

Director, Muslim Public Affairs Council, Los Angeles

Community is basically a group of people who have a common bond. For the Muslim community, it’s a group with a spiritual connection, the companionship they gain from one another and the social and political needs met by coming together in their mosques to discuss the pressing issues facing them in America.

Yet it is as diverse a community as America is diverse. (One problem Muslims encounter is that when) one may say something, it is generalized as being a statement made by the religion. I think the success of the Muslim community is dependent on its ability to relate and interact with the rest of the American public, to become a part of American pluralism.

JOHN CASTILLO

Executive director, Southern California Indian Center, Garden Grove

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I am an Apache. Community is a very important word to our people and the way we’ve lived for hundreds, thousands of years. Traditionally, one of our values is cooperation rather than these industrial values of competition. Ours was always a community of sharing and assisting one another for the benefit of the group.

Our community involves our children, our elders, our adults. It’s everybody. We even look further: all the animals, the air, the rocks. A big value for Indian people is respect for Mother Earth and the belief that our mother is alive and we can take care of our mother.

NANCY HARUYE AU

Executive director, Assistance League of Southern California Western Region, Asian-Pacific Agency, Westchester

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With the Asian and Pacific Islander community, it is basically a socio-political concept or grouping. Our community is so diverse and so dispersed geographically that it’s very difficult to identify a geographic cluster that would encompass what we would consider our community. I’m a third-generation Japanese-American from Hawaii. As a child, we would go to our annual summer picnics organized around clans. Even today there are still those picnics going on, people from Hiroshima-ken, purely defined by geography in terms of Hiroshima prefecture. But there are also clan ties, meaning blood ties, too.

When I’m thrust into a diverse group of people and there are Asians in this group, I find myself more in tune with the other Asians although the Asians may not necessarily be third-generation Japanese-Americans. So there is something more that ties us together, that makes me feel a communal relationship--sort of being able to communicate on a different level. When we talk about Western cultures, it’s usually taught in terms of the Judeo-Christian values shared among that cultural group. With the Asian and Pacific Islander, perhaps there’s a similar tie because we are Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian.

LINDA ALVAREZ

Anchor/reporter, KCBS-TV, Los Angeles

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I was born and raised in Los Angeles, have seen it grow and change. I think community should be defined as a group who have a common bond or goal. It doesn’t necessarily mean people who all have the same skin color or speak the same language. There’s too much diversity within different national and ethnic groups to automatically say that is what a community is. People in South-Central, in Brentwood, in San Fernando or Tarzana who care about their kids getting a good education all have common goals and therefore can be part of the same community--the community of parents, the community of educators--as opposed to a community of blacks or Latinos or Asians.

Commune means to come together. So often when we hear about communities we think of separation. That really hurts the greater community of Los Angeles. Many of us just drive the freeways and don’t think about how other people live. It’s more than understanding that East Los Angeles is predominantly Latino or that Compton is a changing mixture of Latinos and African Americans. We need to get to get off the freeways, get to know people and talk to them.

GERALD MARGOLIS

Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles

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We all emerge from certain kinds of communities, cleave to certain things, belong to certain organizations and define ourselves in different ways. Conventionally, we find a kind of common purposeful coherence. With any kind of community the attempt is to find a solution to problems.

We’re engaging more and more, especially in Los Angeles, in understanding ourselves as a community made of many different kinds of communities. We have a maelstrom of interests. The way our country works is sorting out all these various interests through our political process. It’s almost a moral or social imperative for survival. More and more there has to be an appreciation for difference and, at the same time, of the unifying factors that bring us together now and in the future. We’re striving to understand what will create a just society, include the rights of the individual and how to avoid the harmful, the damaging and the painful.

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Compiled for The Times by James Blair.

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