A few years ago, I listened to week-by-week reports from a radical working-class friend who tried to join a corporate globalization group. He told me of snide comments about his fast food and cigarettes; elaborate group process that took hours; potlucks that were all tofu and whole grains; and an impenetrable fog of acronyms and jargon. He soon quit in disgust. I wonder if the group members understood why he left.

For professional-middle-class progressives like myself, it’s easy to understand why working-class people would be alienated by the mainstream culture of very wealthy people. We tend to be alienated by greed and extravagance ourselves. But the idea that working-class people would have any negative reactions to our own subculture, in particular our values-based “alternative” norms, tends not to occur to us.

However, progressive causes have millions of working-class potential recruits who find middle-class-led organizations culturally difficult — and not just the bigger and more formal non-profit organizations, but also the small, all-volunteer groups. In fact, the more alternative and counter-cultural a group is, the more people who will find it too weird to endure.

There are two different kinds of weirdness: essential and inessential. An essential weirdness is one that couldn’t be eliminated without doing a deep injustice to someone: Gay people may seem weird in some communities, but it’s essential for organizations to support them being out of the closet; speaking out against racism may be taboo in some white communities, but it’s essential to go ahead and grate against those traditional cultural norms.

But if being “less weird” (that is, fitting in more with a particular community’s norms) wouldn’t cause any injustice, why shouldn’t middle-class community organizers just drop their insistence on doing things their way?

I coined the phrase “inessential weirdness” in 1979, when my anti-nuclear group, a dedicated bunch of long-haired men and hairy-legged women, met with a blue-collar senior citizen group about possibly working together against a local nuclear construction project. The meeting was going well when someone proposed we take a coffee break. One of my esteemed counterculture colleagues said, “For the break, let’s all howl like wolves!” And even worse, several people did it! As a big “Owwwww-ooooooh” went up, I saw some of the senior activists nudge each other and roll their eyes. Their group did join the coalition, but no thanks to the howlers. Something in my gut switched sides at that moment, from a previous enchantment with all things alternative to a skepticism about what’s effective.

If you want to build cross-class alliances, don’t howl. If that’s important to you, go off on a retreat with other howlers. Similarly, it may be very important to you to be vegan yourself, but is it necessary to serve only vegan food at a conference that meat-eaters will attend? If we care about our movement’s size, strength and diversity, it’s essential that we be no weirder than we need to be.

Cultural differences between professional-middle-class and working-class activists are not just neutral variations in taste or style, in which each party should give the other equal deference, but power differences between people with different amounts of education, cultural capital, and clout. Unless there’s a good reason to go with the middle-class norm — which sometimes there is — the default in progressive groups should be to operate in the way that seems normal to the least privileged people in the room.

Some professional-middle-class activists take this advice too far and imitate working-class styles of speech and dress, sometimes even creating an elaborate pretense of coming from a less privileged background and living a more gritty life than they do. But one of the first ground rules for successfully bridging cross-cultural divides of any kind is authenticity: we need to be who we really are.

But how can we be ourselves and still build bridges with people who find our differences weird? First, be clear on your goals; is a bigger, more diverse movement worth some sacrifices? Second, notice the cultural norms of people you’d like to work with. Third, figure out which of your weirdnesses are essential to you, and drop the inessential ones when you’re doing cross-class outreach or coalition building. Fourth, don’t impose any inessential weirdnesses on uninterested mixed coalitions. And finally, if you feel a judgmental statement about others’ lifestyles or group process forming in your mind, bite your tongue.

None of this is easy. It’s one thing to briefly change ourselves for a job interview or dinner with the in-laws, but it’s painful to have to change ourselves in our own activist groups. But as civil rights activist and Sweet Honey in the Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagan said about coalitions, “If you’re comfortable, you ain’t doing no coalescing.”

Betsy Leondar-Wright is the author of Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists. She usually finds herself accurately identified as coming from a professional-middle class background at 20 paces. This article is adapted from her website, http://www.classmatters.org.