Aditi Juneja & Johanna Kalb reflect on Take Care’s symposium on building a truly inclusive and multi-racial American democracy, describing the writings and reflections of a diverse array of thinkers who participated in the symposium.

Nativism is on the rise in the United States. It threatens to relegate some citizens to second-class status and degrades U.S. democracy. But the similar experiences of other established democracies show that much can be done to fight it.

Astra Taylor shows that real democracy―fully inclusive and completely egalitarian―has in fact never existed, and that realizing one requires grappling with the ideals of democracy and confronting difficult questions about the democratic process the values it’s supposed to protect.

In her one-volume political history of the United States, Jill Lepore explores the founding truths of the American experiment as articulated by Jefferson ―political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people and seeks to answer the question: has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?

Danielle Allen argues that America has yet to complete the transition to political friendship and trust that Brown v. Board of Education offered. Combining readings of philosophers and theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes practical techniques of citizenship to overcome the fossilized distrust among us.