Introduction to Organising across Sameness and Difference
This piece was written for a broader training about Organising across Sameness and Difference for Citizens UK by Associate Professor Amanda Tattersall, a community organiser and researcher based at the University of Sydney and lead for the Organising across Difference Project with Citizens UK.
The ‘demos’ in our democracy is a reference to the people, but when we invoke these people everyone from democratic thinkers to everyday citizens uses two quite distinctive ways of talking about them.
The first is to see the people as the same. Founding fathers and enlightenment philosophers like Mill and Locke speak about how ‘we the people’ are the same — we have universal suffrage, we have equal rights, we are equal before the law. Democratic politics embody a rich oneness, a unit of common cause that arises out of shared space and identity. According to this approach, the people are equal and unified — united in our sense of sameness.
The second is to see people as different. After all, the experience of building actual democracies, especially in the 20th century as recognition movements from feminism to civil rights shook the assumption of the ‘equal’ wealthy man, revealed that democratic sameness needed to reckon with lived difference. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen explores the long history of seeing the people as inherently and richly diverse, casting the democratic project as the struggle to forge agreement across difference. In contrast to ideas of ‘oneness’ she argues that active solidarity and shared wholeness are key to the democratic project. Implicit in these ideas, and equally apparent in the modern discussion about rights, is the idea of equity which recognises that different people need different things to access the same outcomes.
The concept of equality speaks to our sameness and the concept of equity speaks to our difference, and both are critical to democratic practice.
The concept of equality speaks to our sameness and the concept of equity speaks to our difference, and both are critical to democratic practice. It is a sense of equality and sameness that constitutes the possibility for connection across a polity. Yet if we do not recognise the inherent differences that exist amongst that polity, those who have less power or whose differences are not recognised are forced to ‘fit in’ to a sense of ‘sameness’ defined by someone else. Democracy works when it holds in tension sameness and difference.
Here I outline what it might mean for community organisers to see the perpetual and powerful dynamic of sameness and difference, and show how this struggle and tension between sameness and difference might be useful for framing how we see ourselves as political subjects and help us understand how we can build power and organise across difference.
1. Political Formation & Sameness and Difference
When I was an undergraduate student getting involved in the Australian student movement, the fashionable political repertoire was to rally. We would rally about student fees, but equally we would rally about all manner of environmental and international injustices. I was a political novice, having grown up in family that more observed rather than participated in political life. It perhaps explains why I brought an ‘eager to fit in’ energy to my initial rallying adventures. I was quick to master the sometimes complex syntax of the popular chants. However it was the most simple of all the catch-cries that left me uneasy — “the students, united, will never be defeated.” While the utopian folly of the message should have probably struck me as dubious, it was actually the first bit, about the students being united that tripped me up. Of course, at one level, the students being united was desperately attractive — who couldn’t fall in love with the idea of all students — no matter their campus, their courses, their composition — coming together like one. It conjured dreams of a kind of reenactment of 1968 Paris, where our simple shared identity could miraculously produce political power. But the image quickly faded for me — because I knew that I wasn’t like other students. Only a year before I took up student chanting, I had been hospitalised with a psychosis, and after a two month institutionalisation in a psychiatric ward I was released with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I might have been a student, but I knew I was different.
My difference wasn’t a secret either. My psychosis had begun at a National Union of Students conference two years earlier, and enough people knew about it for it to be a weapon. Alongside rallying, the student movement is known for confecting dispute and debate, and I found my mental illness the subject of others’ arguments against me many times. I was accused of not taking my medication and of being unstable. It wasn’t just that I was different. I was different, and because of it, I was worse.
I have spent decades wrestling with how to live with this difference. Initially I tried sameness as a strategy — consciously committing to work twice as hard as everyone else in the hope that I could prove that I was normal. This was partly a response to the naysayers in the student movement, but it was equally to prove a doctor wrong, who had told my parents that I would be unlikely to recover. After running for and becoming the President of the National Union of Students I felt so compelled to work my hardest that I rarely took a day off. When I finished my law degree, the very degree that the doctor never thought I would complete, I almost burnt myself out to win the university medal. But while overcompensation flowed easily when my mood elevated, it also led to bouts of depression. Trying to be the same as everyone else had the ironic power of reminding me that I was different.
I wish I had been a faster learner, but it took decades and another psychosis until I started to accept and integrate this difference into my sense of self and own it as part of my formation as a leader. Over the past eight years I’ve been on a journey to see my mental health differently — to value how my distinctive moods and quixotic brain create energy and creativity. It has led me to find common ground and common cause, to forgive those who treated me badly because of my mental health, and then later to build connection anew. Seeing difference as well as sameness has given me the space to see who I really am, and can be, in public life.
Sameness
Our political formation and sense of agency emerge from our experiences of difference and sameness. Our civic organisations often invoke sameness as a strategy for agency. It’s not just the students chanting about being united. Unions proclaim solidarity and power based on workers being part of the same class. Theological traditions also straddle the dialectic. Take Christianity where God is both above and ‘different’ to humans, while also embodied as ‘Jesus’ taking on the ‘same’ form as us. In sociology, Robert Putnam plays with ideas of sameness and difference in his conceptualisation of social capital, identifying ‘bridging social capital’ that creates relationships across difference and ‘bonding social capital’ that builds relationships between people who are similar.
Popular language like ‘identity’ connects to sameness and difference. Identity politics is a catch-all (and not always helpful) phrase used to anchor the political importance of race, gender, sexuality, ability, neurodiversity to our experience of public life and as a foundation for social action. The call to recognise identity seeks to draw attention to difference, and to disrupt and challenge the public systems that appear equal, while actually excluding or failing to support different identities.
Community organising draws power from a collective sense of sameness based on place. Organisers draw together a powerful broad-based network of diverse constituents that have a shared connection to a place, embodying an old philosophy of sameness articulated in the Torah, “but seek the welfare of the city … for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7).
Sameness is a theme across much of our political life because it is critical to how we experience agency and power.
Sameness is a theme across much of our political life because it is critical to how we experience agency and power. A sense of connection and identification with the other fuels our sense of belonging and the feeling of not being alone. Belonging and connection create the foundations for collective action. Sameness helps us act with others. In this way sameness is connected to power.
However, like the exercise of power, a politics driven by unencumbered sameness is dangerous. Sameness without difference makes parts of us invisible. Sameness on its own is at best wishful thinking, and at worst sits behind some of the worst abuses in our collective history.
This is why it is useful to see sameness and difference as a dialectic. Think about power. Community organisers guard against power’s tendency to corrupt through the creative and accountable practice of building ‘power with’. In a similar way, we hold the hopeful, but potentially myopic energy that can arise out of feelings of sameness by honouring and being accountable to the differences that sit in and amongst us.
Difference
Our differences are the qualities that make us distinct. Derived from the word ‘differ’, difference refers to the things that set us apart. Some differences are visible, and others like class are less so. As organisers, we are only too aware how difference is not only intersectional but experiential, where our sense of self is shaped by how our differences are lived and the importance we place on those experiences across our life.
I’ve learnt a lot about the concept of difference by reflecting on my mental illness. Mental illness has a variety of qualities that are quite distinct, and one of them is that mental illness is characterised by crisis or acute phases. While my bipolar is enduring, in that it is a long term condition that I have lived with since I was 19 and I will manage for the rest of my life, one of its features is that it can move into an acute crisis. This is similar to most mental illnesses, when for example anxiety or depression spike. What it means is that mental illness can change how you see yourself and how you behave at any given time. When I am hypomanic or depressed I am not only different to others because I have a mental illness, but I can be different to how I think of myself. It is a reminder that the concept of ‘difference’ is not simply a way of seeing ourselves as distinct from others — but a reflection that we are constantly changing and that as humans we embody difference. While my differences can be extreme, what is true for me is actually true for all of us. We are constantly changing — experience and relationships change who we are, what we desire and what we care about.
We are constantly changing — experience and relationships change who we are, what we desire and what we care about.
Even so, while we are constantly changing — the ways in which our differences are seen by others and treated by public institutions are more difficult to change. I may see my mental illness with equanimity — seeing its strengths as well as challenges — but I still did not tick a box declaring my ‘disability’ at my work because I did not trust others to see my mental illness in the same way. Moreover, as I filled out that form I could hide my difference, a privilege not available when it comes to race, gender or disability. In public life power shapes the way in which our differences impact us. When our differences are not valued or when they are used to treat us as less than others, then difference is not only about how we see ourselves, it is about how we live our lives.
The language of identity has understandably emerged as a way of taking seriously how difference in public life is linked to public power. Identity, which comes from the Latin root word ‘idem,’ meaning ‘same.’ The word identity is sometimes used to make generalisations about who we are based on certain features — for instance our gender, race or neurodiversity. Identity is powerful in that it can call out big systems of exclusion — like how people with the same gender can face the same kinds of prejudice. But just like the concept of sameness, identity can be used to make generalisations about who we are and how we build power that brush over our differences and simplify the complexity of public life.
It is why I find the dialectic of sameness and difference more useful than identity.
It is why I find the dialectic of sameness and difference more useful than identity. While an identity lens might call out ‘big systems’ like the patriarchy or white supremacy or the importance of gender or race, it can brush the particular in all of us. Unifying concepts and grand narratives can overlook and undervalue the myriad of experiences and relationships that are constantly intermediating who we are.
2. Community organising and Sameness and Difference
One of community organising’s greatest strengths is its ability to attend to the dignity and power of the ‘small’ and different, even when it examines the big public dimensions that affect our lives. Building a politics that values the specific and the particular is not only powerful for building genuine connection across difference, but a difference lens also offers a distinctive political gaze. It is primed to see how no big ‘sameness’ power system is omnipotent but rather helping us see how it is also a rich mosaic of ‘different’ opportunities and possibilities that can be changed with our agency. In this way, while sameness can be a force for connection and belonging in the story of our political formation, difference can be a force for creativity when it comes to political strategy.
In community organising, we use the dialectic of public and private to express the political dimensions of our private lives. The concept of ‘the public dimensions of our private lives’ is used to analyse how public pressures are often the source of private pain. It helps leaders re-conceive personal problems — like an inability to pay rent — and recast them from a personal failing to a product of broader political causes. The argument helps make a case for collective action by showing that different personal experiences are ‘effects’ sourced in a bigger ‘cause’.
Diagram: Public and Private
Organising argues that leaders are made and not born, and so often it is the process of interpreting the experience of being different and being treated as ‘less’ that serves as our pilot light for action. We teach this as ‘cold’ anger,’ where our grief for love lost or love denied to us is connected to a sense of hope that things can be different, then harnessed as energy for action. But this process of exploration and reflection is iterative, something that develops unevenly through relational meetings, personal reflection, training, reading and learning and political action. The process of political formation moves from seeing yourself as different and isolated, to a place where difference is held with sameness.
This process of interpretation is vital, because difference in and of itself is not politicising — instead it can often lead to feelings of shame. When other students in the student movement went around saying I was mad, I was humiliated. My first response to public reactions to my mental illness was not anger — I wanted to disappear. Having a sense of yourself only through the lens of difference is isolating. Repeated negative experiences — not finding a job, not getting a promotion, struggling at school — may very well be interpreted as personal failings. A shift happens when those experiences are linked to a broader political cause, like racism. But diagnosis of a problem is not the same as becoming a leader to change that problem. Leadership emerges when you connect with others and find a way to challenge what you have experienced. Across this path, the emerging leader comes to see themselves as different to and the same as others as they move from relationship to action, and the path to political action sees the ‘big’ political forces while finding ways to press for change that demonstrate that the big system is not omnipresent but offers ‘different’ (albeit it often smaller) opportunities for action and change.
Our relational approach
But even for community organising, a process of political formation and solidarity that honours difference is not easy.
Our primary tool is the relational meeting. Jonathan Lange from IAF Metro, who worked with Citizens UK, used to emphasise that in organising we build relationships to ‘relate to, not identify with.’ While finding a similar experience or interest can create feelings of connection in a relational meeting, the energy that comes from that moment of sameness can unintentionally impede our curiosity to explore and share other parts of ourselves. Tentatively content, like having just won a round of ‘snap’ — there might be a sense that a sufficient connection has been made, and that now we can go on and explore action. This may be the case, but what this conversational practice renders silent are the unseen differences. While their significance might not be immediately obvious — after all — a basis for a further relationship has been found, we are not necessarily clear about the deeper interests that move the other person. Moreover, if another person’s long term journey of political leadership depends on them interrogating and exploring their own experiences of difference, our conversation may have parsed that slower and bigger purpose.
Even when we honour the practice of ‘relating to’ others, there are other relational qualities that are useful for creating the space required for solidarity that values difference. For instance, sharing who we are — as leaders — is an important element of powerful relational meetings. Creating a space for relational exchanges often requires the ‘instigator’ of a relational meeting to be vulnerable. This could be a bigger part of how we teach and prepare for relational meetings, encouraging leaders to write political autobiographies that help them engage in the kind of self-reflection that give them the ability to create spaces for powerful exchange. Another skill relates to listening. We teach relational meetings particularly as a process of asking the right questions — about why questions not what questions, for instance. But we could do well to more consciously teach about how to listen well, where listening is also about having the ability to sit with someone else’s pain, and how listening is not about trying to fix it or reduce that pain. Listening is about how to listen to someone speak about who they are and their core beliefs irrespective of whether what they are saying fits with your values or not. Learning how to listen is to learn how to explore and understand where someone is coming from, not correcting them or offering your own opinion in response.
This process of listening and sitting with difference has come up as an important feature of the Citizens UK Organising across Difference project, where the goal is to uncover strategies that strengthen our ability to respond to “difficult differences.” There are plenty of fault lines in and amongst our communities and within any broad-based network — ideological differences, religious differences, organisations with different kinds of power, geographic differences, different approaches to gender and sexuality. How we recognise those differences while also seeing how we can still connect between each other is the challenge not only for good organising, but for building strong democracies.
Citizens UK creates organisations that respect all people, and we know that one of the strengths of community organising is that it builds connection across an unusual network of partners. While we say that our work is based on people putting aside differences for the pursuit of the common good, is this enough to build lasting solidarity when strong differences exist? Are there other strategies or additional approaches we can use to improve a culture of ‘agreeing to disagree’, either amongst organisations or among leaders and organisational members?
There have been some green shoots arising in the pilot work for the Organising across Difference project. Citizens Essex in Southend hosted their first relational experiencing — a Weaving Trust — where 40 people from the Mosque as well as a variety of other local groups came together to get to know each other in the context of building an alliance together. The event was held at the Southend Mosque. One of the groups involved in the Southend work was Southend Pride. Organisers Juliet and Grace were conscious that they wanted to create a welcoming space for conversation while not being directive about what was allowed or not allowed to be said. In setting up the event they offered some draft cues, a note on the agenda and a spoken directive for people to use to help them to listen and not judge each other. They said:
“If something comes up that grates you or something comes up that is different to what you feel or believe” we would ask you to pause and acknowledge that you are learning.”
In one conversation there was a discussion between a Muslim man and woman from Southend Pride. The man asked “who did you come with?” and the woman said “my wife.” In that moment, the man took a breath and gave this response “thanks for telling me that — to learn more about you.” The exchange let difference sit in the room, without anyone having to change themselves to make the other person comfortable.
Holding difference and sameness is an invitation to hold in tension the bigness and smallness of who we are and how we build a political life together. Seeing sameness helps us see common spaces for political action, it lets us identify the causes behind the issues we face — the public dimensions of our private lives. But if sameness is detached from an understanding of difference, ‘big systems’ can feel too big to change. Seeing sameness without difference can also lead us into action in ways that skip over the uncertain and unpredictable differences between us. Political formation and political action arises out of the tension between the big and the small, between holding the tension between our distinctiveness and our connection.
For more reading on these topics:
Allen, Danielle (2003) Talking to Strangers: anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. University of Chicago: Chicago — on how difference and sameness relates to democracy.
Chambers, E. (2003) Roots for Radicals: Organizing for power, action and justice. Continuum: New York. Chapter — see in particular Chapter 4: relationships private and public — on public and private as a framework in community organising
Tattersall (2021) Scaling Change — On making change big and small. First published in Griffith Review 73: Hey Utopia, now accessible for free here (it is also can be listened to as a podcast here) — On the idea of difference and sameness, and relational meetings.
