Radical Citizenship: The Beginning of an Authentic American Democracy

The United States is celebrating 250 years of independence from the British Empire while the current president wields executive authority like a king from a now-gilded White House. How ironic.  

Then, white (slaveholding) men signed Charters of Freedom and rejected the humanity and freedom of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Today, that hypocrisy, that contradiction, that exclusion fuels the crisis of belonging in every aspect of our society and makes this anniversary more sobering than celebratory.  

American flags wave as fireworks light up the sky to commemorate a democracy that, at this very moment, is producing the largest rollback of Black political representation since Reconstruction. This was precipitated by one of the latest wrong-headed decisions of our Supreme Court, Louisiana v. Callais, that has demolished what courageous, radical citizens fought and bled for during the Civil Rights Movement, our Second Reconstruction.  

At Dēmos, we reject anti-Blackness and every policy choice and narrative animated by it.

Communities in my backyard in Newark, New Jersey, protest a democracy where immigrants are held in Delaney Hall, a modern-day concentration camp, exposed to human rights violations in broad daylight. All the while, this administration, along with its state-sanctioned violence, attempts to normalize its cruelty, because socialized in the American psyche is the violent lie that Black and brown people are not human, nor are they worthy of justice.  

At Dēmos, we reject anti-Blackness and every policy choice and narrative animated by it. We refuse to be gaslit any longer. 

Honoring What Was Won 

There is a real tension worth naming before we talk about building anew. Our forebearers put their emotional well-being, bodies, and lives on the line for the civil, economic, and political rights gained since the First Reconstruction. In spite of cycles of white-led backlash, Black people especially gave everything for a future too many did not see. Protecting those gains is honorable, and I salute the freedom fighters of the past and the grassroots leaders of today (and tomorrow) for their undying commitment to progress.  

But even the most extraordinary wins are not endpoints and treating them as destinations to defend is not how we build the democracy that we need. 

The Civil Rights Movement did not win the Voting Rights Act and stop; it immediately turned to the work of economic justice, of voter registration, of base-building that would sustain the gains through the inevitable retrenchment.  

The next terrain must be a more expansive frame of human rights, so we don’t continue litigating our humanity with white supremacists. 

The Centuries-Long Contest for Power Fuels Our Conflict 

Our democracy is but a veneer, a shell of what could be stretched thin over a system that was never actually run by “we the people.” Across the long arc of U.S. history, the daily decisions that determine who governs, who has a voice, and who is included have been made not by the public but by a coalition of corporations, wealthy individuals, and white supremacists who depend on exploitation, extraction, racial hierarchy, and othering. That coalition has called the shots from the beginning; today, they are committed to rolling back progress in every shape and form.  

Will we have white minority rule or a multiracial democracy?  

At this milestone, as we’re still forced to debate who belongs while enduring an unending contest for power that rages on—between those who hoard it and those who would share it—we must ask ourselves what comes next.  

We have two opposing visions, one of which continues to threaten our shared future and shared fate: Will we have white minority rule or a multiracial democracy?  

The architect of Project 2025 declared they are “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Their intentions are obvious, and we must be sure to clarify ours. 

I declare that the future belongs to a multiracial democracy—even as the United States is projected to have no racial or ethnic majority in the next two decades. Yes, across a spectrum of backgrounds and experiences, people of color are the rising American majority. However, we cannot rest on demographics alone. It is our time to rewrite the rules of our democracy and build power for the people.  

Radical citizenship is a praxis for building power and living the ideal that democracy is not something we have but something we do. 

This is the long arc we must now invest in, and I believe that “radical citizenship” is the answer. 

Radical citizenship is a praxis for building power and living the ideal that democracy is not something we have but something we do. And we do it together.  

Democracy as a Practice: What Radical Citizenship Requires 

As I wrote in May, worker power is one of the clearest expressions of radical citizenship as a principle: The practice of democracy begins with every political and policy win—because every win is a new foundation for what we’re building, not defending. 

For most of this country’s history, “citizenship” has been defined as a set of individual rights that must be guarded from government, from neighbors and immigrants, and from the claims of the collective. This is not a neutral conception of citizenship, but it has been a successfully divisive one.  

Radical citizenship is not a correction to this conception but a fundamentally new one entirely. It says that democracy is something you do—in relationship, in community, across difference, with and for the people you share this country with. It is the collective authorship over the conditions of our shared lives. And it moves in three ways.  

It connects. Radical citizenship is the fuel for collective action, responsible for cultivating the communal relationships that are central to democratic power. Moving from the grassroots to the grasstops, from local organizing to national policy, from the people most affected by broken systems to the institutions that must be remade to serve them, radical citizenship is both relational and fluid. 

It insists. Radical citizenship refuses to subordinate the long-range work of building people power to any political climate, election, or ruling. It does not wait for permission, and it does not sacrifice real demands for incremental progress. 

And it fortifies. Radical citizenship rejects subjugation and instead arises as a commitment to not self-abandon—as individuals, as neighbors, and as one country. It sustains the people practicing it against every attempt of those in power to deny or minimize its potential, and it will never trade a liberatory future for short-term survival. 

I’ve witnessed radical citizenship through our movement partners everywhere from the Southwest to the East Coast. In Amazon warehouses, in early education settings, and in care homes across the country, workers are organizing, bargaining, and refusing to accept their labor as a commodity—doing democracy directly, on the job, every day. Right now, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who are fighting back against redistricting campaigns are practicing radical citizenship, insisting on Black political representation as a right, not a concession. 

What Radical Citizenship Demands: Democracy for All 

If you want to know whether a country is practicing democracy, examine whom it excludes. 

For the past year, systemic xenophobia has been unleashed with unprecedented force, especially given that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history. People who’ve lived here for a lifetime—people who raised children, built businesses, paid taxes, and wove themselves into the fabric of their communities—are being removed without due process.  

The promise of radical citizenship is that all people who are governed by a democracy’s decisions must have a voice in shaping them.

This is a moral failing of the highest order, and it’s a democratic crisis. The promise of radical citizenship is that all people who are governed by a democracy’s decisions must have a voice in shaping them. Immigrants are governed by American policies, American institutions, and American norms that are inherently discriminative. To exclude them from the practice of democracy is to uphold a weaker, more dishonest democracy than the one we claim to have. 

As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on Trump v. Barbara, the administration is attempting something that the 14th Amendment flatly prohibits: stripping birthright citizenship from children born on U.S. soil. The question of who belongs is being relitigated at the constitutional level, by a president determined to answer it as narrowly as possible. 

No one’s rights are safe when someone else’s rights are conditional. The erosion of immigrants’ rights, of Black voting rights, of workers’ rights are not separate stories. This is one story that could end badly for us all if our opponents win. To secure our collective thriving and shared prosperity, radical solidarity is a must.   

Radical citizenship cannot be fully realized if it’s practiced for only some of the people. We practice it for everyone, or we’re not practicing it at all. 

Reimagining Belonging at 250 Years 

A fully inclusive democracy does not shrink the circle of citizenship. In its abundance, it expands what citizenship truly and equally means for everyone. The democracy we are building—through the power of radical citizenship, which connects, insists, and fortifies—does not take anything from anyone. It makes America’s promise possible for everyone. 

A quarter millennium in, and we’re still learning how to do democracy. This is not a failure, however, but the nature of the work. Just as “hope is a discipline,” democracy is a practice—one we must deepen, sustain, and pass forward.