Communities: Judge One- Judge All

Home is where you feel most comfortable. Communities do not always accept the people that live in the community. They don’t always make the community a good home for those that they don’t accept. When this happens in a community it creates an awkward environment for people that are different, or not exactly cookie cutter material, according to the majority of the particular community. There are quite a few reasons that people stay in what they consider to be unfit communities. Communities do not accept everyone and you hear about it in the news constantly with hate crimes and other rude acts that happen because someone acts on their judgmental ideas that their neighbor doesn’t fit into the neighborhood. When someone does feel they fit in, they will put more effort into being involved with their home and with those that are around them. When they aren’t accepted, they will not put as much heart into fitting into the community that is shunning them. Home really is where the heart is.

If communities accepted everyone in them, there wouldn’t be any hate crimes against different races, sexual orientations, or just people that are a little bit different in normally unnoticeable ways. America is a community full of many different races, but like Richard Rodriguez states in “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans,” “Race mixture has not been a point of pride in America.” America hasn’t accepted those that are different in a lot of cases. Not being accepted makes people not want to try to be accepted. There are many every day occurrences where people immigrated many years ago, yet they still don’t speak English. This happens because they don’t want to fit in to where they aren’t accepted by Americans that do speak English. Although they live in America, and spend their days living their lives in a community full of people speaking English, they chose to speak their original language because that is the language they are comfortable speaking.

In “Reclaiming Our Home Place,” Maya Angelou says “In exile, and in many cases, not realizing it but terribly uncomfortable” when she is talking about black people living in the North. They have lived there for so long without being accepted, technically without fitting in, without having a complete sense of being home. When out of place in a community, there isn’t always a chance to leave. This may be because of financial situations, because of a lack of another place to go, or because of the lack of motivation to make a move. Just because someone stays somewhere, it doesn’t mean that that is where they belong. Maya Angelou said “Wherever home is, the closer one gets to it, the more one relaxes.” Communities don’t always accept everyone, but when someone is accepted, they know it, and want to be there because they feel very cared for and much more content then they would in the opposite situation.

If communities accepted everyone for who they were, it would only be because they happen to fit into the general populace of said community. In “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia,” David Brooks wrote about a man in a community that fit in very well.
“He has come to be surrounded by regular, friendly people who do not scoff at his daughter’s competitive cheerleading obsession and whose wardrobes are as Lands’ End-dependent as his is.”

This man fit in because they are all similar to each other. They accept each other, because they are all in the same boat. They wear clothes that make it hard to decipher between each person from their neighbor. The homes resemble the other houses in the neighborhood, as well as the people. This works for some people. They put their heart and soul into fitting in because the harder they work to fit in, the more people accept them for trying. Some may even consider their community to be their family. They judge each other, but they accept that fact about one another.

Society today is, overall, very judgmental. Not one person can say that they do not make assumptions about someone when they first see and meet a co-worker, friend of a friend, some random person the street, or anyone in general. In some communities this is considered to be a very large issue, in others, it is not very noticeable. Communities defiantly do not accept everyone for who they are and are normally very open about their dislike for what they consider to be odd. Sometimes, people even go out of their way, to find something that is wrong with someone else.