Community Development Thinking: Window into Tara in Grad School

This doesn't hold a candle to Rick's beautiful poem about Juniper, and is a bit dry, but is what my life is full of these days ...

The body is good to think with, or, what a reading of Coates can offer community development thinkers

“You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

-       Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bestselling book Between the World and Me is typically read as a framework for understanding the history, racism, and experience of being black in America. It does offer brilliant insight into all of this. It also offers something more novel: a new language and analytical framework for community development. Coates’ notion of the body (specifically the black body) as the primary site upon which history has been written and resistance performed, is a tool for more deeply and fruitfully engaging with the foundational concerns of community development theory and practice.     

Community development is something of an unwieldy term that can be defined in a myriad of ways. Offering one partial definition, historian Alice O’Connor (2012) describes community development as a “time-honored tradition in America’s response to poverty” (p. 11). A deeper theoretical interrogation is provided by the political scientist Jnanabrata Bhattacharyya who suggests that community development is a response to the erosion of agency and community solidarity, or shared identity and norms. Bhattacharyya (2004) writes that the ultimate goal of such work should be to promote “human autonomy or agency – the capacity of people to order their world, the capacity to create, reproduce, change, and live according to their own meaning systems, to have the powers to define themselves as opposed to being defined by others” (p. 12). Taken together, these definitions indicate that the praxis of community development should involve efforts aimed at both understanding poverty and increasing community capacity through (re)building the power of individuals.

This conceptualization does not only identify the focus of community development. It points to the need for incorporating the individual as a unit of analysis. “Community” cannot be interrogated and addressed without engaging the building blocks of that community: individuals. So, how do we conceive of the individual from a community development perspective?

This is where we return to Coates’ notion of the body. In his formulation the body is where history – and specifically those developments that have generated poverty and violence – is embodied and continually manifest. For Coates, violence perpetuated by black men and women is a response to the anxieties inherent to their own physical vulnerabilities as black bodies in a racist world whose riches have been built on their own backs. Poverty and violence in poor minority communities are consequences of laws and policies that have deliberately attempted to make bodies “breakable.” Black bodies have been the target of the very policies and actions that have engendered the kinds of inequities community development so often attempts to address. Addressing his son Coates (2015) writes,

“The process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tasting and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies” (p. 8).

The visceral quality of Coates’ language of the body is important. Effective community development initiatives cannot only be grounded in an analytical understanding of what poverty is and how it has been created. They must be informed by a knowing of poverty, a sense of what it means experientially. If poverty and inequity are the primary problems of community development, the body is good to think with. It sheds light on how conditions of poverty have come to be, and the texture of their consequences.  

Thinking of the individual through the framework of the body also allows us to engage the ultimate purpose of community development work: agency. Again, since community-level capacity rests on the self-actualization of individuals, the individual must be considered alongside community. The agency of individuals is in part built and manifest in the body. In conditions of inequity and poverty it is often built through healing. It is manifest as resistance. Commenting on the audacity and swagger of urban youth Coates (2015) remarks, “they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies” (p. 15). Physical presentation and presence, ways of inhabiting the black body, are methods of resisting impoverishment and other forms of racialized oppression. There is agency in resistance and thus the potential for agency to be accessed and exercised through the body.

Coates does not directly engage the body as a site of healing, which is anther critical means of promoting agency or, as Bhattacharyya writes, peoples’ ability to define themselves. This is where community development thinkers have an opportunity to build on the foundational framework Coates has established. Thinking through the body as a site for (re)building power through healing allows us to conceptualize radical interventions that defy the limitations of conventional initiatives as part of the community development tradition. It is a framework for thinking about why community development matters, what it is, and what it could be.

My next post will explore that potential. For now, I’ll leave you with one last chilling quotation from Coates (2015) that makes the relevance and utility of his language for the capital-obsessed community development thinker undeniable: “Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value” (p. 132).