And another idea
Second idea for Ruth Kelly's Commission: find a new word that isn't "community" to describe groups of people with a common enthnicity or faith.
We have to get people to see their "community" as everyone who lives in their village, town or city, not just the people "like them" if we are going to get cohesion and integration.
The idea of defining community by ethnicity is fundamentally racist - imagine if people started talking about the "white community".
The idea of doing it by faith begs the question which community are those of us who are atheists part of? Presumably we are not entitled to a community and are just supposed to be atomised, random individuals.
The community I live in is Stoke Newington. It includes people of all faiths and all ethnicities. Let's find another noun to describe the collections of people who share a faith or ethnicity and reserve the concept of "community" as something universal, inclusive and open-to-all - a way of uniting people not dividing them up.
1 Comments:
Well said.
2:30 pm, August 26, 2006
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