When states want to protect us, Trump attacks them. When states want to attack us, he protects them. That is the upside down reality we now face. But how do we face it?
One way is seeing issues like AI as part of this power play, which I address at the bottom of this newsletter and recently wrote about here. But first, I want to talk about the Voting Rights Act.
The New York Times' Upshot ran a piece last weekend by Nate Cohn and Eve Washington arguing that race-neutral, nonpartisan computer simulations would produce roughly the same number of "minority-opportunity" districts across the South as the Voting Rights Act did. They argue that, in the absence of the Voting Rights Act, a “race-neutral, nonpartisan redistricting process could create just as many House districts where the candidate preferred by nonwhite voters … would be favored to win,” as long as states stick to "traditional standards" like compact districts and respect for county lines.
This is a classic case of missing the point about power.
The Voting Rights Act didn't exist because civil rights lawyers in 1965 thought neutral maps wouldn't be enough. It existed because everyone—then and now—understands there is no such thing as a neutral map, let alone a neutral process for making it. There is only what states with power choose to do with the power they have. I have often said that government budgets are moral documents: budgets reflect decisions, and decisions reflect values and morals. Maps are the same: they reflect values, and they demonstrate who has the power to impose their values. Within that matrix, the VRA was a guarantee backed by federal authority and enforcement: while gerrymandering was a fact of political life, it could no longer go so far as to lock Black voters out of representation. Because that is the goal of the power-holders in most of the South: to make racial minorities permanent political minorities, even in a world in which "majority minority" demographics abound. The VRA was one of a dozen tactics deployed across generations to prevent exactly that, which required a higher power than an individual state’s power to intervene. At that point in time, we had the power to change the federal rules in ways that shaped the rules and realities in the states.
The Cohn/Washington piece closes by gesturing toward what states "could" do if they followed traditional standards. But the only tradition of standards in the South is state legislators and governors doing everything they can with their power to grab more power, or at least keep the balance of power from shifting.
Technocratic thinking of this kind, even with a hopeful vision behind it, has extremely limited utility and can even serve to quell or distract the very energy we need right now to regroup and fight back effectively. The simulations are interesting, but the simulations are not the variable. The variable is what state legislatures, freed from federal oversight, are going to do with that freedom—and the answer is already being written in real time across Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida.
This is not about process, but about power. When states want to protect us, Trump attacks them. When states want to attack us, he protects them. It is the opposite of how it is supposed to be. On voting, we are watching that play out at speed. The questions we need to be asking now are about how we reduce the power that holds that corruption of democracy in place, and gain the power to replace it with something that has a very different value system behind it.
Fighting for Voting Rights in Alabama and Mississippi
Last Saturday, I joined more than 5,000 people in Montgomery, Alabama for "All Roads Lead to the South." It was an incredible event: a prayer at Tabernacle Baptist in Selma, a silent march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and a rally on the steps of the Alabama State House, where I was one of the speakers. There were a hundred buses, 160 Alabama organizations, and nearly 100 satellite actions nationwide—all in response to the Louisiana v. Callais SCOTUS decision destroying the Voting Rights Act and the right-wing redistricting push that immediately followed.
There’s a lot of discussion about what we do now. Many are working from deeply seated instincts, thinking in terms of restoring what we lost. The thing I keep saying: I don't want to get in any time machine unless it's to go back for music or fashion. "Restore what we had" is not a compelling message and will not move the people we need to move. What will move a broad coalition with the power to create a new reality is the recognition that this is a must-win crisis and real investments in solutions that match the scale of it. That means new symbols and new energy. It means honoring the past without pretending the past is the destination.
A few things to hold onto:
Gerrymandering is happening everywhere right now, while corporations and their billionaires are quietly leading the way—funding the maps, the legal infrastructure, and the candidates who benefit from suppressing our voices.
Political imagination and not political theory is what leads to structural reforms. Proportional representation, Supreme Court reform, and other big changes the moment actually requires—they come from passionate people charging forth. There is no going back, and the rhetoric of restoration will not help us. Trying to walk a technocratic path to a pre-Trump federal baseline that itself was never going to hold is not a strategy.
The scale of the loss has to be understood as bigger than voting alone, and the scale of the contributions of Black voters must be understood as bigger than Black people alone.
That last point is key: Climate policy, LGBTQ equality, labor rights, reproductive rights—no progressive cause advances in this country without Black voters electing the people who have proven essential to advancing them. Eliminating Black political power is the strategy to take all of those causes down at once. Articles like the NYT piece only help them do it.
When you don't treat racism as core to their strategy, you won't treat racial justice as core to ours. I’ll be honest: When I say this to people who don’t feel directly affected by what’s happening right now, they often agree fervently… but still don’t feel affected or feel the need to shift strategy. I know many of us get it intellectually. But we need to push one another to a deeper place in terms of feeling the stakes. And we need to realize the investments needed.
We also need to be honest about what is standing in the way, including the lack of reciprocity of who is asked to stand up for who overall across our sector.
Two investments to prioritize now:
The right state/federal mix. With the federal government no longer checking state legislatures, state organizing requires a big boost. That does not mean we should, or can afford to, give up on the federal level. If Congressional power shifts, federal investigations and other federal actions become possible again—and we must demand that any federal politicians and officials we support be ready and willing to lead those fights. And we must rethink and invest differently in our approach to the courts.
Black voices and infrastructure. We must invest in the voices we have just made quieter. Black infrastructure across the movement has been defunded for years, against the background of Black voters being falsely blamed for Democratic losses—over and over. I write about blame in From Presence to Power for a reason: The community most depended on by the broader progressive coalition is the same community most punished for that coalition's failures. That has to be named, and the answer has to be investment, not more blame.
New Op-Ed: Unregulated AI Hurts Black America More Than It Helps
And speaking of what states can do right now— I have a new op-ed out at NewsOne on what the Trump administration is trying to do with AI regulation.
We're facing a world where an AI system can decide you're too risky for an apartment, drawing on databases you'll never see and can't correct... where a hiring tool screens for the "right fit" and quietly filters out applicants by name, zip code, or the school they went to—proxies for race, class, and disability. Where political content engineered to mislead voters fills your feed with no disclosure that a machine made it. None of this is hypothetical. It is already happening.
And the federal government is actively preventing states from protecting people from these algorithmic harms.
It’s the same as our voting rights: Federal policy should be a floor, not a ceiling, for accountability.
Once again, the question is purely about power. The administration’s goal is to punish and restrain the states that protect us, and enable the ones that don’t.
When the federal government walks away from that responsibility and then blocks states from picking it up, the harms land on the people least able to absorb them. That is almost always Black communities first—in hiring, in lending, in surveillance, in how narratives get manipulated to undermine our political power.
What Trump and his allies are doing is knocking the floor out, letting everyone fall down, and then closing off any chance of building a new one, so that when the federal government refuses to act, no state can step in either. On voting, that looks like gutting Section 2 and letting legislatures redraw the maps however they want. On AI, it looks like blocking states from regulating the systems that are already making decisions about people's housing, jobs, and votes. Different mechanism, identical logic: weaken the rules that protect us, then make sure no one has the power to rebuild them.
AI does not erase those patterns. It accelerates and exacerbates them.
More on this in the op-ed, which you can find here. Read it here
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