Community has a longstanding positive, albeit nebulous, value reiterated in American social sciences as well as political rhetoric. “Community groups,” “community boards” and “faith community” all underscore civic virtues of cooperation, unity and citizenship in contrast to potentially divisive images of clubs, neighborhoods, or religious sects.

Community service is an increasingly common requirement for high-school and college students in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, while “community” appears in analyses and politics as an alternative to politics and government—a real America.

While community has thus entered the sacrosanct mythology of mom and apple pie for many Americans, these usages also betray certain negative aspects that demand attention.

First, community may easily be used in an exclusionary fashion. Preserving “community,” for example, sounds better than resisting integration or newcomers.

Appeal to “community standards” also has a long career in censorship of American art and literature, from Joyce’s Ulysses to the nudes of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Second, community can also be an imposition on others. To speak of the “black” or “Asian American” community (avoiding race) or “gay and lesbian” community implies a unity of action and experience, much less volition that does not reflect the lives or politics of individuals and groups that constitute these segments of American society While Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined community arising through shared media can provide insights into American nationhood as well as Southeast Asia, we must always watch who does the imagining.

Finally community can be used in ways that are patently false. Sales brochures refer to suburbs and walled developments as residential or gated communities, despite the alienation that often characterizes them.

Nonetheless, the stress on building shared interests and dialogues—“community video/ television” or “community activism”—underscores the creative processes of American society and change, at times in opposition to inherited structures or government/corporate control. In the decline of government safety nets in health, education and welfare, “community service” also forces many Americans to confront the dualization of contemporary society and its consequences.