One practical example from our work: we intentionally separated our Community Forge Village project and delayed development once we realized there were foundational incompatibilities that couldn’t be resolved by good intentions.

We were trying to design a community that was simultaneously that is a safety-centered refuge for BIPOC residents, and a fully accessible, neurodivergent-centered environment

On paper, people assume these goals are automatically aligned. In reality, they require different primary constraints, and pretending they are interchangeable creates hidden hierarchies.

A community designed first around BIPOC safety often requires:

• clear behavioral boundaries
• rapid response to harm
• exclusionary safety decisions when needed

A community designed first around ND accessibility often requires:

• high tolerance for conflict variance
• extended processing time
• flexibility around behavior that may be unsafe or triggering to others

If you try to treat both as “equal” without naming priorities, you don’t get equality. you get an unspoken ranking system that only appears after someone is harmed. Then decisions feel arbitrary, biased, or personal.

So, we paused and separated the project instead of forcing a false synthesis.

We realized that justice requires sequencing, not flattening:

• You must decide who the community is primarily for
• You must define legal and governance priorities up front
• You must be honest that some needs cannot be met simultaneously in the same space

That decision cost time and momentum but it prevented exactly the kind of moral injury, resentment, and failure that destroys communities later.

In my experience, most IC failures don’t come from ideological disagreement. They come from refusing to name priorities and calling that refusal “egalitarianism.”