Belongingness
For awhile now, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about belongingness. What does that mean, exactly, and why is it important?
Belongingness is the sense a person has that he or she is interwoven into the lives of others that person desires connection with. Others can be a specific person (a best friend or partner), a given group (one’s colleagues, a social organization like a club or active political group, one’s family), or, more broadly, society. The critical factor in belongingness is mutuality: I feel accepted and valued by this person/group/society as much as I accept and value them..
I first came across this term while researching my book about my brother, who has TBI. Before his accident at 18 years old, Dan had an array of connections, a strong sense of connectedness, of belongingness. Most of those connections were disrupted by his accident; all of them were changed. His friends, solicitous in the first weeks after he regained consciousness, sending cards and notes and stopping by for the occasional visit, dropped away. Forty-three years later, Dan still feels a connection to them—he cherishes his memories of them—but he lost his sense of belongingness after their cards, notes, and visits petered out and they lost touch with him. He continued to share belonging with his family. Although we were variably present and helpful in his efforts to reconstruct his life, he knew we all loved him, that he was woven into our very being even when we weren’t directly engaged. He felt more belongingness with those who were the most present at given times—to each of our parents until their deaths; to my older brother Dave, who was his closest connection for years; and to me in recent years, after I arranged for him to move near me. He also has gained a strong sense of belongingness through my husband Dyke, his son Dylan and Dylan’s fiancée, and, to a lesser degree, my church community, which has been warmly accepting on the times he has attended church with Dyke and me.
Still, belongingness with the broader community has been more elusive for Dan, as it can be for many people with impairments. A lack of belonging in the dominant culture is a problem for marginalized groups in general. Race, class, and gender, along with disability, characterize the most prevalent divisions. The BLM movement, with its statement “Black Lives Matter,” has pointed to some of the problems—institutional as well as individual—that the absence of belonging can cause. White people as a group experience fundamental belongingness with those who run institutions, make policies, and enforce those policies. Black and brown people less so. Much of the hardship that people in marginalized groups experience in our society are, if not caused by, at least enabled by weak or absent belonging with those in institutional and social positions of (relative) power.
At core, racist individuals don’t feel and so don’t extend belongingness to the members of races other than their own. What underlies anti-Muslim, anti-Latino, anti-women—pretty much anti-any group—feeling is an insistence that those people don’t belong. And the consequences of a lack of belonging with those who run things aren’t just hurt feelings (although it’s certainly that too), but they also take the form of physical violence and the denial of the full rights of citizenship. Those in the dominant group—those who make up the foundation of that category—may experience violence too, but the violence is responded to differently. For instance, a mass shooting conducted by a White man is discussed as an individual anomaly, a problem of mental illness; a shooting by a Black or Muslim man is attributed as inherent to their respective demographic groups. That kind of us-not-them mentality reflects the racist’s fundamental disconnection from them, the conviction that they do not belong.
We all have a need for belongingness. We need to feel—and be—integrated into the larger community, as well as connected to those closest to us and around us. Belonging and belongingness are essential to our psychological and physical well-being. They are literally a matter of (quality of) life and (greater risk of) death.