The Idea of Community Vs. Identity Politics

For much of my twenties, my idea of community was shaped by the political currents of the time.

Identity politics, first articulated in the 1970s and ascendant in the last decade, taught us to attune ourselves to structures of inequality and privilege — class, race, gender, sexuality, education and geography.

The language of safe space

The language of safe space emerged to describe environments in which marginalized people could gather, protected from harm and find solidarity.

These aims were, in many cases, emancipatory. Identity politics offered a necessary corrective to universalist politics that ignored lived inequality. Yet, something counterintuitive unfolded alongside them.

Over time, its emphasis on protection and categorization subtly altered the emotional architecture of community itself. Safety became the organizing principle and space its primary tool.

Communities, siloed from one another

As new communities formed, they often became siloed from one another. What began as a means of protecting the marginalized increasingly functioned as a mechanism of separation.

Communities defined themselves by the harms they sought to avoid rather than the futures they wished to build. Political disagreement became moral threat, and discomfort was recoded as danger.

The focus on maintaining distance

In her book, Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar wrote about how identity politics, in practice, inhibited coalition-building on the left by foregrounding difference over shared interest.

One could find oneself 85% aligned with another person and still feel the remaining 15% justified distance.

Personal experience as politics

At the same time, politics increasingly mingled with personal experience. Our collective vocabulary expanded to include depression, anxiety, ADHD, trauma and neurodivergence.

Therapy culture has boomed. The language of protection — triggers, boundaries, space — migrated from the consulting room into everyday life. Space came to signify safety: emotional, psychological and political.

Proximity vs. distance

Over time, this emphasis on space warped my understanding of community. Political and personal principles intermingled to a point where it was difficult to understand where one began and the other ended.

Community became something organized around distance rather than proximity — around self-protection rather than mutual exposure.

Taking space was rebranded as healing, withdrawal mistaken for maturity. What was framed as strength often resembled an inability to tolerate discomfort while remaining present.

Conclusion: Hardwired for closeness

Humans, however, are hardwired for closeness. Bonds are forged not in distance but in proximity — in the shared endurance of awkwardness, vulnerability and, yes, also friction.

Community is not sustained by insulation from discomfort, but by our willingness to endure it together. In laughing, playing and failing in front of one another, we are not made safer — we are becoming closer.

All of which is why we would all do well to recognize that perhaps the biggest political challenge today is the making of community, its maintenance and dealing with the ruptures that tear at its seams.