President’s Letter: Race and Democracy

Dear friends, 

Whatever your opinions about specific candidates or parties, we should celebrate the enormous turnout from diverse communities in New York City’s mayoral race and in elections around the country this week. It was a resounding reminder that democracy, while still facing enormous threats, is very much alive. 

The ability to cast a ballot, something most of us take for granted today, was a hard won victory — the fruit of generations of struggle culminating in the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Last week, I had a chance to join a training led by some of the veterans of the movement whose work made that law possible. Hundreds of Black organizers and activists gathered in Tennessee to learn about strategic nonviolence, the method civil rights organizers used so successfully to force an end to Jim Crow. The training was led by Dr. Bernard Lafayette and his disciple, Charles Alphin. Dr. Lafayette was a major protagonist in the movement, having participated in or helped lead the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama. 

The training was a powerful moment of intergenerational transmission and exchange. This lineage of nonviolence — the practical tools and the ethos of love that give it power — is essential to revive now as the country again faces an existential crisis of democracy.

I came back from the trip full of hope that these precious teachings were again being put to use. They are our inheritance — the wisdom that has powered pro-democracy movements in this country and around the world for centuries. 

But I found myself achingly sad, too. How are we here again? I wondered. How have we come to a point in this country’s history when our gains are threatened? The answer, of course, has to do with the history and present reality of racism in this country. Diagnosing the ailment correctly is essential to finding the right remedy. 

Sixty years ago, two laws transformed America: The Voting Rights Act, a breakthrough in the long struggle to realize democracy in the U.S., and the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was signed the same year and put an end to racist quotas barring immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 

These landmark victories broadened who had power in America and sparked an ongoing reckoning about the meaning of citizenship and who fully belongs in this country. They were often treated as proof that the country had finally turned the page on racism. But in reality, deep structural inequities persisted and new forms of backlash emerged. 

Today, the federal government is orchestrating a campaign to reverse these gains and return to a pre-1965 racial order. For an ascendant authoritarian movement, the racism is the point. It’s not accidental or incidental; it is key to the authoritarian project. 

This campaign is ugly, as it attempts to reanimate forms of white supremacy from the darkest pages of our history. It’s also strategic. For authoritarians, racism is a deliberate strategy to divide people and weaken our collective power. From Apartheid South Africa to Hungary to Brazil, cultural and racial scapegoating often become the scaffolding of authoritarian rule. Racist attacks on any one group mask the authoritarians’ real goal: depriving us all of our rights so that they can concentrate power and wealth. 

These efforts demand a resolute response. Thousands of everyday people in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere have answered the call, standing up against brutal federal occupations of major cities and attacks on immigrants and people of color. But too many powerful people who voiced support for racial justice during the uprisings over the murder of George Floyd are now walking back their commitments to equity. 

In doing so, they overlook the multi-racial majority in America that doesn’t want to see us go backwards. Polls show that, despite our divisions, 64 percent of Americans believe that racism persists, and 91 percent believe that everyone should be afforded equal opportunity regardless of race. Fighting for racial equity can motivate this latent majority, which includes large numbers of white people as well as people of color. 

We must heed the lessons from past struggles for democracy. In the United States, nearly every major expansion of democracy — from Reconstruction to those landmark 1965 laws — has been driven by or inspired by movements for racial justice. The lesson: When we talk about racial equity, our country makes progress. When we are silent, we go backward. 

For those of us working to rebuild democracy, the imperative is clear. We must recommit our institutions and our communities to racial justice, despite and even because of the threats. And we must speak openly about what we face, clearly naming the racial dimensions of the government’s actions. Doing so is the first step to finding a path forward. 

In the first ten months of 2025, the president has pardoned white nationalists. He has targeted cities led by Black mayors with punitive deployments of military an d National Guard troops. Supported by historic levels of Congressional funding, he has given a masked police force carte blanche to detain and deport immigrants without due process. When asked to declare the overt racial profiling unconstitutional, the Supreme Court instead blessed the targeting of people of color by law enforcement. This has resulted in more than 170 U.S. citizens being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a report by ProPublica. 

The president’s Justice Department has pursued politically motivated actions against Black leaders like New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. His administration has systematically purged Black leaders from their roles in military leadership and government agencies and rolled back diversity programs. His allies have threatened and punished universities, law firms, and businesses for their commitments to racial equity and have forced museums and military libraries to downplay America’s history of slavery and segregation. 

The administration has illegally ended foreign aid, causing grave hardship in some majority non-white countries. It has also shuttered our nation’s long-running refugee program and replaced it with a system that admits a small number of white South Africans and Europeans. 

On top of all this, we are seeing mid-decade redistricting efforts designed to further erode the political say of Black and brown communities. The decisive blow would be an upcoming Supreme Court decision potentially gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that has ensured representation for Black voters and other voters of color. Its end would mark the close of an era of relative political equality, and a return to a racial order characterized by the suppression of Black political rights.

The scope and speed of retrenchment on racial justice across every aspect of American life is breathtaking. 

At the same time, the temptation to stay silent, wait it out, or hope that someone else will step forward is real. I know firsthand the immense pressure that comes with leading an institution in a moment like this. But we can only protect what we care about by standing up for what we believe in, and we have to do it together.

I left that training in Tennessee filled with both grief and hope. The organizers whose work made the Voting Rights Act possible were not naive about America. They knew our country at its worst — but they believed too in the promise of what America could become. The most provocative element of nonviolent methods is the insistence that we act out of love, including for those doing harm, and that we act with the intention of changing hearts and minds.   

With such a commitment, we can see the Supreme Court’s likely decision on the Voting Rights Act not only as the end of something. It can mark the beginning of a broad-based, multi-racial movement to renovate and improve our democracy for the next 60 years and beyond. And to be successful, this movement will put racial justice at the center of the fight for our democracy. 

As Coretta Scott King famously said, “Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.” Now, it’s our turn.

In solidarity, 

Deepak Bhargava