featured image | Pedro Lastra
What happens when the strategies I use to fend off wounding become a way of life? Eventually, I no longer notice that I’ve shut myself off from others. When I try to avoid pain or fear from childhood trauma or despair about the world—I narrow what I feel, what I allow in, and how I relate to others. It creates distance, even isolation.
However, facing suffering directly does not mean accepting harm.
Recently, I made lasagna for my neighbors. A small act, but something in that experience helped me lean into my loneliness instead of moving past it. We had a wonderful time together, and I began to see that “what is fractured in the world around me is not separate from what is fractured within me”, and insight expressed by community organizer, Marisela Gomez. None of us is disconnected from the possibility of something better, something more beautiful.
Chicago is my home. As I move through it, I begin to notice the same patterns of avoidance and isolation on a larger scale, not just in how we live now, but in the conditions that shaped how we came to live this way.
This land was home to diverse Indigenous nations long before it became a city. What is here now is shaped, in part, by the forced removal of those inhabitants, by a history that includes enslavement, and by violence that has not been reckoned with and is ongoing.
I leave my house early to avoid morning traffic. As I walk to my car, I pause. My yard is green; the bushes in front are full. Our block is spacious, and the homes are well cared for. I drive east on North Avenue from Harlem to Damen, a main east–west artery that carries me through a wide cross-section of Chicago, a city segregated by race. When I get to Central Avenue, the vacant lots multiply. Where are the manicured yards with flowers? Where are the grocery stores?
People live here, raising families. There are no visible fences, but there are invisible ones. The changes are explicit, stark, because something has shifted. What’s harder to accept is my own dissonance: how quickly I read this as “desolate,” feel afraid, and want to move away.
I notice the narratives running through my mind, shaped by what I’ve been taught about this place—about Black people, about “bad” neighborhoods, and what I should expect from them. These stories are constant, and they create distance between me and what I see.
As I stop at a red light, I take a few deep breaths. I feel the sensations in my body; I notice my heart. I recognize these feelings as “fear”, tied to personal experiences of violence whose effects still linger in my family. But then fear recedes, replaced with sadness and rage.
As I continue to drive a little further, the grocery stores return, homes “improve,” and the population becomes more diverse. I notice my strong emotions recede, while another form of discomfort arises—my sense of complicity.
I ask myself: What can I, as a woman of conscience, do?
I’ve started by listening to women who are building something else. Not waiting for permission. Building while staying tender. In Chicago. In Detroit. In East Baltimore.
These conditions didn’t just happen by accident.
Marisela Gomez, organizing in East Baltimore, explained redlining like this: the federal government and banking institutions mapped cities in ways that ensured Black communities were denied loans, land ownership, and the wealth that comes with it. Co-founded by Gomez, The Village of Love and Resistance (VOLAR) is a Black- and Brown-led community cooperative. The work emerged in response to long-standing disinvestment and seeks to reclaim land, rebuild abandoned housing, and create a base of community power through healing and mutual aid. They are following models such as Market Creek Plaza in San Diego and Mercy Corps Northwest in Portland—efforts that center residents not just as participants, but as decision-makers and owners.
They are part of the Solidarity Economy, a global movement that prioritizes people and the planet over endless profit and growth. It is grounded in practices that already exist: cooperative housing, community land trusts, worker cooperatives, and mutual aid networks. VOLAR is part of this movement. They connect daily life to the broader work of community rebuilding. Neighborhood residents are shaping the vision and building toward cooperative housing and a shared community hub, spaces that are collectively owned and cared for.
During a webinar hosted by Making Visible, Marisela talks about what becoming whole means:
“Emerging from this fragmentation really means when we come back together as organized communities, we have cohesion again and there’s power that we lost from being so fragmented—we regain some of that power. We have strong networks that hold us together, we get social capital. We participate again because we feel valued and we know someone’s got our back and we know our voice is heard; it’s not just pushed to the side. So, we go to City Council meetings… Coming out of this fragmentation and rebuilding this cohesion is so critical.” (quote edited for clarity)
In Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, an activist group, formed as a response to young people facing police violence and the absence of safe, Black-centered, youth-led spaces for Black women and femmes. Co-founded by Page May, their work is grounded in Black radical and abolitionist traditions and Black queer feminism. They’re rethinking safety beyond policing and incarceration toward Black self-determination. They run political education circles, workshops, and campaign training. They organize protests and direct actions. They create spaces that affirm Black life. Just as important, they build relationships over time through mentorship, healing rituals, and intergenerational support that center Black joy and repair.
I watched a documentary from Al Jazeera where Page May speaks directly about accountability:
“If you, as people in positions of power—police officers, state’s attorneys, mayors, all of these people who hold positions of power—if you use that power with blatant disregard and disrespect for Black life, you will be held accountable, you will lose your job, you will lose your funding, absolutely. I believe that Black lives matter when we make them matter.”
At the end of the documentary, Martinez Sutton—brother of Rekia Boyd, a Black woman shot by an off-duty police officer—says something that stays with me:
“I had an officer, during a protest, [ask] ‘why you still fighting.’ I said, wouldn’t you—if somebody came and took away your sister, your wife, or your son or daughter, would you just stop fighting, would you stop talking, would you turn away from the world?”
And in Detroit, Avalon Village, led by Shamayim “Mama Shu” Harris, is an urban eco-village and community revitalization project built on a once-blighted block of vacant lots and abandoned structures. It is a resident-driven effort to transform neglected land into safe, beautiful, multi-use spaces for children, families, and entrepreneurs, without waiting for traditional developers or city planners. They combine housing, education, healing, economic opportunity, and ecological innovation into a single, dense, walkable village within the city.
During an episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Shamayim “Mama Shu” Harris says:
“Local self-reliance means being a true solutionist—someone who takes charge and stays consistent. Consistency is everything. Keep showing up, doing the work again and again, so people know you’re in it for the long haul and that your intentions are real. In the end, it’s simple: to be empowered locally, you have to do the work.” (quote edited for clarity)
This is rebuilding community, rebuilding the Village, on a block that was once vacant.
My drive through Chicago no longer feels like a route from one place to another. It feels like a path through a split self, a culture that has cut itself off from its own pain and then blames others for what it has exiled.
When we allow ourselves to be touched by what we see, we learn a way of living that resists separation and leans toward care and shared responsibility.
In that webinar, Marisela Gomez spoke about both inner and community fragmentation—how our cities have been shaped by people who saw themselves as separate and aimed to keep people apart.
How do we make ourselves whole again?
Perhaps we can begin by turning toward one another, openly and honestly, without pretending we already have the answers.
Comments (0)