There is a fantasy we are sold about community.
It looks like warmth.
It sounds like agreement.
It promises belonging without friction.
But proximity is not safety.
Proximity increases the likelihood of rupture.
As we said in our first conversation, the people closest to you are the ones most capable of disrupting you. Your neighbors can bring you soup in an emergency. They can also drive you absolutely insane. Both are true. That is not a failure of community. That is the reality of proximity.
Safety is not sameness.
Safety is repair capacity.
If a space cannot tolerate rupture, it cannot build safety.
And rupture is inevitable.
We will harm each other.
We will misunderstand each other.
We will misread tone, capacity, history, and impact.
The question is not whether harm happens.
The question is: what happens next?
Supremacy culture trains us to expect comfort, urgency, and consensus. It teaches us that if something feels uncomfortable, it must be unsafe. That if conflict arises, someone must be wrong. That repair must happen immediately or the relationship is doomed…
A Note on Zawn
Before we go any further, I want to say something personal.
Zawn Villines of Liberating Motherhood is not just a collaborator in this work. She is my friend.
And that matters.
There are many white feminists in the world. There are very few I would trust to sit inside hard conversations about power, harm, race, repair, and supremacy culture without collapsing into defensiveness or performance. Zawn does that work. She sits with it. She metabolizes it. She does not rush to be absolved.
What you are witnessing in this series is not theoretical alignment. It is practiced relationship.
We do not agree on everything. We do not move through the world with identical lenses. But we share commitments. We share staying power. We share a refusal to flatten complexity for comfort.
That is community.
This collaboration exists because we have chosen to stay in conversation. Because we have allowed proximity without demanding perfection. Because we trust each other enough to name rupture without making it spectacle.
I love that we get to share this work.
I love that our friendship gets to model what we are teaching.
And I love that you get to be inside the container with us as we explore the inconvenient truths of community together.
Now, let’s get into it.
