How do we decide in our own lives who belongs and who doesn’t? How do cliques operate?

Cliques usually have people with similar interests together as they can help each other to achieve their own goals; it also means that they share a lot of common interests since they have similar goals. People find their groups when they find themselves happy with the people that they are spending their time with.

More broadly, who constitutes “we,” especially when it’s so difficult to arrive at and locate a common voice, stance, or attitude on a given issue?

Even though I believe that there is no definitive answer to this question as the question can have different answers in different circumstances, I would argue that the “we” should be represented the majority of the group or the voice that is the most well-built or the oldest as it has seen a long building process which grants it to have a higher quality.

What potential violence is there in drawing lines between who belongs and who doesn’t?

Drawing lines is a classic type of symbolic violence as classifying an individual or a group out of what it belongs will feed false information to the rest of the group and also people outside the group about the false information of the victim. The victim will then be treated in ways based on the false information that is brought out by the symbolic violence.

The other type of violence is the structural violence in this case. Throwing groups or individuals out of a larger group means they wouldn’t be able to access the resources that they otherwise would have been able to access which can lead to varying degree of changes to the victims.

How does this relate to Home Fire or the poetry of Langston Hughes?

In both Home Fire and Langston Hugh’s poems, the exclusion of a minority group is very evident in the larger group which is the society that the protagonist should have attached to. However, they are rejected by varying reasons and caused many difficulties on their lives.