> but these things happened and are happening not in the context of a cooperative community.

They absolutely could be. A cooperative community full of racists might very well attempt to kick out people of certain races.

> you have a status quo where other forces can also banish a person.

Ah, see, but we don't have that status quo. Nobody can kick me out of my apartment, as long as I keep paying rent. And that paying rent part, isn't even strictly something that would get me kicked out, in certain places!

There are tons of laws and rules and regulations that very much prevent people from being kicked out of places.

> i don't get what you're getting at.

What he was getting at, is that it should be obvious that just because a majority of people want someone kicked out, that this might not be a good reason to actually kick them out!

EX: if a majority want to kick out certain races, we, as society, should prevent that majority from democratically excluding certain races.

So, in other words the answer to the question of "why should you be allowed to live somewhere if the community wants you out?" is because we live in a society, and in that society we want to prevent racists from kicking people out of where they live, even if they kick them out democratically.

If I understand the point you’re trying to make - I appreciate it, but I wonder if you might be talking past each other.

Just to be clear, consensus is intentionally very different from a simple majority system - the way that most of the historical racist systems have perpetuated.

It’s certainly not impossible for these things to exist in a consensus based environment, but it’s a different beast.

> Just to be clear, consensus is intentionally very different from a simple majority system

Ok call it a consensus then. We as a society, want to make laws, that prevent certain communities from enacting a "consensus" to kick out certain races from where they live.

> We as a society, want to make laws

I'm definitely not convinced that laws can protect people from injustice. Rules can if they're consented by everyone (while laws are imposed by a minority of self-serving politicians).

In some communes i know, an overtly racist person would not dare to join because there's already established people of color in the community and a strong commitment to various forms of decolonization. In others, they may slip in, but will get very rough feedback if they're open about it. Of course racism can be more low-key and normalized and i've seen my share of that, but that's definitely not welcomed either in most communities. I'm not saying racist communities (racism being part of their identity) don't exist, but i've never seen any one and i'm personally not interested to see one... (though to be fair i'd much rather have them live their dream white patriarchal life in a corner rather than try to impose it on everyone else)

It's definitely valid for a commune to recognize as a goal to fight against racism. It can take many forms, but just like any fundamental principle it must be decided early on and approved by consensus in order to become part of the commune's essence if you will. Of course, if you build a so-called apolitical community (such as a property-based housing coop) and don't take a stand, then you're doomed to repeat the same schemes and mistakes we witness everyday around us in society. Of course political communes make mistakes too, but there's always times and venues to address the issues and learn from the mistakes.

PS: A consensus is not a majority. One dissenting person can break a consensus, while 45% can fail to break a majority.

"i don't get what you're getting at."

like Galileo Galilei,a large number of great people who were ahead of their time were persecuted, prosecuted, burned at the stake, or worse. Life is more than a popularity contest, people have rights even if everyone hates them.

I do not take issue with the co-op having this condition - maybe they need everyone to gel together for their village to work. However I agree with the OP that if this were to become a common clause, it would cause even greater inequality and discrimination than we have today.

All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake. It's the same with redlining - a few people in the federal housing administration wrote these rules that everyone else had to follow.

How can 90 people discriminate against a group of 10 people if every adverse action against one person requires the other 99 to agree? This system makes abuse much more difficult than the system we have now.

Easy, you single out one of them and the rest are afraid to back them up.

I was just studying a case where a person was accused of a crime, and there was a massive media campaign slinging dirt at him. He needed several people to testify to his innocence, but everyone was afraid of being associated with him and of consequences that might have for their career. He was sentences to 8 years in jail.

On appeal the media crazy died down, so the folks did testify, and he was acquitted, but he spent two years in jail for no reason.

"All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake."

You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power.

Centralised power structures usually follow rules, however flawed they are. Clauses like this don't even have rules, they can just remove you because they hate you.

> You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power.

A local power is still a centralized power compared to a system where everyone has to agree on a decision. In this case, priests and local police were instrumental in creating and maintaining the environments where these things happened. And I seem to recall that there was a certain international organization putting people on trial and then burning them.

Your argument is basically that we need to set up some people with way more power than other people, so they can protect the least powerful people in the society from abuse. Then we set up rules and hope people in power do what they're "supposed to". Sometimes that works out for some people, but as a general principle it's completely backwards. A better idea would be to distribute power more equally to everyone, so that they don't have to wait around for the favor of the powerful.

All these civil rights examples seem to conveniently gloss over the century when our federal government explicitly supported slavery and the decades when that government did nothing about lynching. That's not because the federal government wasn't powerful enough - it commands the armed forces. It was because the constituency affected by these things didn't have enough power to make the government change it's policies.

The counter is liberalism, i.e. governing structures characterized primarily by their defenses against authority. No redlining, but also no removing people that you don't like. The rule is that the state is limited in its ability to force individuals to do things.

People seem to think that democracy is the ticket and that anything decided by the democracy is the best we can do, but liberalism will elevate anti-authoritarianism above the will of the people, as a majority is no less capable of authoritarianism than a dictator.