Buses on a River: On the Infrastructure White Liberals Have Failed to Build

2026. The 250th anniversary of the United States. A celebration of victory and exceptionalism has been rising in volume all year, yet we know this myth of guiltless glory is false. Ours is a nation founded on Native genocide and the enslavement of African people, harm that has never been meaningfully acknowledged or repaired.

The historical record is clear. Black communities achieved massive policy change from Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Acts of the 1860s and 1870s to the Voting and Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s to the sweeping DEI commitments of 2020. And then organized white backlash dismantled these gains: Redemption followed Reconstruction, Massive Resistance followed the Civil Rights Movement, and the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement has produced, among other things, a regressive Supreme Court handing down rulings such as Louisiana v. Callais which has stripped thousands of Black voters of representation and put 191 state legislative seats at risk across the South.

The question this pattern forces is not “how do we win more.” It is: why do the wins keep getting dismantled? And whose responsibility is it to change that?

Black movement leaders have long been clear in their analysis of the three groups at play in the movement for racial justice: Black, Indigenous, and communities of color who continue winning real structural transformation across generations; white people who actively organize against justice and democracy (the backlash); and white people, who claim to hold values of democracy and equity, who vote consistently and read the books, but who are not taking the relationship-based, daily actions that would actually transform the behavior and culture of themselves and their white peers. This article is about that third group. Of which I am a part.

Why do the wins keep getting dismantled? And whose responsibility is it to change that?

For many of my 12 years in this movement, I disregarded these questions and focused on winning more. I took a month off to volunteer full-time on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. I attended countless protests, from Michael Brown to George Floyd. Since 2019, I’ve volunteered with the incredible Rollin’ to the Polls, mobilizing Black voters in West and North Montgomery, Alabama. It was an honor to work at the Equal Justice Initiative for three years, which educated me about the depth and continuity of racial injustice in our nation. In many ways, I was doing the work.

And then I would come home.

Two blocks from my house, my neighborhood’s association met each month. Its mandate was to preserve historic buildings. But as I learned when I finally chose to join, this group of older white residents was instead using it as a forum for organizing police surveillance and arrest of our Black neighbors.

Showing Up Where We’re Actually Needed

The connection to my day job was not abstract: in Alabama, arrests feed into a criminal legal system that strips people of the right to vote. I was fighting disenfranchisement at the level of history and policy, while two blocks away, my neighbors were organizing it in real time. And I was choosing not to be there.

Initially, I left each meeting enraged. The entire hour focused on just the first agenda item: a report from six police officers on “community safety” which devolved into racist dog-whistling. But if I wanted to organize my white neighbors, I had to get close and be curious instead of retreat in exasperation. I learned that no one’s needs were being met: our Black neighbors were being harassed; our white neighbors remained isolated and lonely; and one police officer told me directly, “This is not where we want or need to be.”

We experimented with one small and one big change. Small change: we switched the order of the agenda items. The community safety report moved from first to last. Instead of 60 minutes, it then took less than 10. Instead of six police officers, only one kept coming.

Big change: creating an alternative to calling the police. We started developing a community mediation process, led by a multi-racial and multi-generational group of neighbors and local pastors, to address the frictions of neighborhood life without defaulting to criminalization. It was slow and remains incomplete; I moved before the work was finished.

I offer this not as a success story but as an indication of what can become possible when white people show up where we are actually needed: at the source of the problem, within our own communities.

Organizing Infrastructure

Volunteering, voting, protesting and learning are all vital. They are the foundations of meaningful participation in the multiracial movement for justice. What my failures demonstrate is the risk of focusing solely on external outcomes, when the culture that determines whether those outcomes survive was happening right in front of me.

Dr. King named this failure, as did James Baldwin. Malcolm X, in the final chapter of his autobiography, wrote:

“I tell sincere white people, ‘Work in conjunction with us—each of us working among our own kind.’ Let sincere white individuals find all other white people they can who feel as they do—and let them form their own all-white groups, to work trying to convert other white people who are thinking and acting so racist… Working separately, the sincere white people and sincere Black people actually will be working together. In our mutual sincerity we might be able to show a road to the salvation of America’s very soul.”

Black and white communities have different work to do—and require different infrastructure to do it.

Black communities—from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to the redrawing of racist congressional maps in 2022—have built extraordinarily robust organizing infrastructure that achieves their goal: policy change.

White liberals have not done the equivalent. Building effective infrastructure requires first seeing our responsibility clearly: that our communities are where the backlash is organized, time and again, and that we are not only witnesses to the problem but participants in it. This confrontation—that we are responsible for changing the culture so that policy wins are sustained—is not something that white liberals have been willing to engage.

Clearly, there is a shared destination: justice, repair, genuine democracy. But with different groups starting from different places, the same path to get there won’t be successful.

It’s as if Black activist communities are on land. They envisioned the road ahead and built a bus, and that bus continues making progress. white liberals look at that and think: we need a bus. But we are not on land. We are standing on the bank of a river. Buses sink in rivers. What we need is a boat: something designed for where we actually are, to get us where we want to go. We haven’t built it because we haven’t been willing to admit we’re standing on a river.

This riverbank that white liberals are standing on is our own communities: families, neighborhood associations, workplaces, schools. This is where culture is (re)produced and backlash is organized, and where white liberals are consistently absent.

Every time we lean into instead of away from a reckoning conversation, something unexpected and hopeful develops that points us to the next step.

In my own experience, I know that talking to my white neighbor feels a hundred times harder than phone-banking a stranger in a swing state. I can hang up on the stranger. My neighbor, my family member, my colleague—those relationships carry history, care, and real risk.

Research shows that attitude shifts from deep-listening and narrative conversations between strangers can hold for up to four months. But relationships and repeated contact are vital to moving from attitude change to long-term culture transformation. White liberals already have these relationships. The Public Religion Research Institute found that 90 precent of white Democrats’ and 93 percent of white Republicans’ core social networks are other white people. We’re just not using them.

Culture Change

This is what Reckon With is building: a structured, ongoing practice space for relational organizing, so white people who say they care about justice can become the frontline of the culture change that policy wins require to survive.

When and how do we go about changing culture? This 250th anniversary year is giving us a lot of opportunities to try. Between May and July 2026, 46 participants (including me) went through Reckon With’s inaugural fourth of July program, using Independence Day to turn toward our white communities rather than away from them.

With this in mind, I knew I had to do what I hadn’t in over a decade: go back to my hometown in Connecticut and attend my neighbors’ annual fireworks BBQ.

Over my two-week visit, I had one-on-one conversations with three of my four neighbors. I was honest, for the first time, about why I had avoided coming home, how anxious I had felt to share my true beliefs with them, and how that fear had been deteriorating our relationships. I apologized for turning away.

A pattern that is common across Reckon With’s participants emerged: every time we lean into instead of away from a reckoning conversation, something unexpected and hopeful develops that points us to the next step. This time it came through asking a neighbor’s daughter for her advice on how to talk to her father when I disagree with him. I learned that she is also trying to have hard conversations with him—not about racial injustice, but about honesty and depth in their relationship. Without knowing it, we were both working toward the same aspiration: how to invite this person into something more authentic.

I took her advice about when and how to approach her dad. It helped. I let her know. And most importantly, through those two weeks, I was honest with her about my beliefs as they arose. I chose to trust that twenty-eight years of relationship can hold steady under the weight of truth.

A few days later, walking together past a poster reading “Party like it’s 1776,” I said something instead of staying silent. I shared about the Juneteenth event I’d attended and my own reckoning work, including reconnecting with Black Woodsons to whom I am related because my ancestors enslaved their ancestors. Every time I shared truthfully, she stayed. She listened. With grace and curiosity. Nothing came crashing down, as I had feared. It was the opposite. The more honestly I share, the closer we can grow.

Did my actions result in immediate or dramatic change? No. But did they give me a clear next step toward repair? Yes. That is how I’ve learned that culture truly changes: one caring interaction at a time, over time, for a long time. Until white liberals commit to this granular, disciplined, loving and rigorous work, equitable policies won will remain at risk of derailment and all of us will suffer in the absence of repair and genuine democracy.

A companion piece sharing what emerged across the 40+ Reckon With participants who participated in our 4th of July program will be forthcoming. If you’re white and looking for support to do this work, consider joining a Reckon With peer support group at www.reckonwith.org/joinus.