Today's reflection offers a perspective on difference.
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Reflections for Uncertain Times
The Attentional Newsletters
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“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
— Audre Lorde
Solidarity does not require sameness. It requires the willingness to live and grow with our differences.
Poet, philosopher and activist Audre Lorde warned that communities often seek unity by flattening difference, demanding assimilation as the price of belonging. But such unity is brittle. It fractures under pressure. “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences,” said Lorde.
Painter Kehinde Wiley’s portraits offer a visual rebuke to our failures to accept difference. His subjects do not blend quietly into inherited traditions; they reconfigure them. Classical poses once reserved for kings are taken by those excluded from power. The effect is dissonance, and that tension is precisely the point. It is the value of difference. Society evolves when difference reshapes the center, rather than being pushed to the margins.
When our sense of belonging is fragile, division becomes a substitute for solidarity. We heighten differences and marginalize others in order to protect our own sense of identity and belonging. This is the central challenge of our current political moment. A shared sense of American identity and the American Dream is in decline, division is the inevitable replacement. The longer this division is the expedient substitute to the real work of understanding our differences, the more our communities and organizations will be reduced.
Difference, properly engaged, is a source of deeper understanding of the world and ourselves. Our task is not to resolve difference once and for all, but to practice living in it—openly, patiently, and imperfectly.
EXPLORE
To learn more about the positive effects of being around people who are different from us, see this Scientific American article, "How Diversity Makes Us Smarter."
A good primer for understanding our political and cultural differences is Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion."
- Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” common paraphrase from paper delivered at Amherst College (April 1980), reproduced in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984).
- Kehinde Wiley, "Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman" (2008). Seattle Art Museum, Washington.
