This article focuses on how democratic ideals are translated into practice with regard to dealing with background inequality between participants in participatory spaces. The paper draws on a tension between deliberative democracy and difference democracy. Although recent decades have seen a closing of the gap between these two streams of democratic theorizing, they could still be said to propose different methods for dealing with background inequality between participants. This paper builds on an ethnographic study of Rockaway Wildfire, a local branch of the wider Occupy Sandy network that emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York City in 2012, to organize politically with socio-economically marginalized communities struck by the storm, with the aim to empower them. Occupy activists held and practiced ideals best conceptualized as being part of a difference democratic theory whereas the residents instead questioned, challenged and resisted these methods, based on ideas adhering to a deliberative democratic reasoning. Through an analysis building on participatory observations, field observations and interviews, three theoretical problems are brought to light: the problem of situated marginalization beyond commonly acknowledged identity markers, the problem of variation in individual agency and the problem of intersectional positions.