I Am Because We Are

The United States was founded on democratic ideals while denying many of its inhabitants access to them. U.S. democracy as it exists today is the work of generations of people who refused to accept the limits of its founding. Democracy only thrives when we work together to continue expanding its promise. The work is not to preserve institutions as they are, but to fulfill the democratic ideals they have yet to realize.

Democracy is more than a system of government. It is a way of living together, a daily practice of mutual recognition, shared responsibility, and collective decision-making. It is the habit of seeing strangers as neighbors and neighbors as people whose fates are bound to our own. The Constitution can protect our rights, but it cannot make us value one another. Elections can transfer power, but they cannot create trust. Laws can establish accountability, but they cannot teach empathy. Those things are learned in the ordinary moments where people decide they belong, on stoops and porches, at block parties, in the small, casual acknowledgments that say “I see you.” When those moments disappear, so do our sense of community and our ubuntu. 

Growing up in Harlem, I watched that happen.

I remember block parties stretching down 129th Street and Lenox, elders sitting outside on white plastic chairs watching children run through the water bursting from fire hydrants, the unmistakable signal that summer had arrived, and neighbors who said “Hello,” because even without knowing a person’s name, it’s our colloquial way of saying “I acknowledge you.” 

Those moments taught me something long before I understood civics: Community is built through showing up.

As Harlem changed, so did those spaces. Luxury buildings replaced apartments where families had lived for decades. Familiar storefronts disappeared. The bodega became an overpriced yoga studio. Conversations that once happened on sidewalks became harder to find. As gentrification swept Harlem, pieces of civic life also disappeared.

I started asking a question I could not answer: What happens to a democracy when people lose the places where they learn to care for one another? 

Democracy is a relationship.

In a Georgetown Battleground poll taken in March 2024, 81percent of voters describe democracy as being threatened. We point to misinformation, political polarization, declining faith in institutions, and a numbness to news that arrives in a constant state of disarray. We debate policies designed to fix each problem one at a time, yet we rarely use systems thinking. 

A democracy cannot thrive when people have forgotten how to imagine themselves as part of a collective future.

For me, the language to describe that future came through ubuntu, a Southern African philosophy often translated as “I am because we are.” During my semester at the African Leadership Academy through the School for Ethics & Global Leadership, I began hearing the phrase not as a slogan but as a way of living. I realized it isn’t simply a cultural value. It is a democratic one.

Ubuntu insists that our humanity binds us together. It asks us to understand that another person’s dignity is connected to our own. That idea feels almost radical in a country that celebrates individual achievement above nearly everything else.

Yet democracy has never been an individual project.

Every right we enjoy today exists because someone organized, imagined something better, and believed strangers were worth fighting alongside. Democracy has always depended on people choosing each other before institutions recognize them.

That realization changed the way I think about my own home. I founded UbuntuHarlem Magazine because I was tired of seeing Harlem spoken about instead of spoken with. Too often, Black and Brown communities appear in headlines only through statistics or stereotypes. Young people are interviewed after tragedy, not invited into conversations about possibility.

When we launched our first issue at the Guggenheim Museum, two Harlem youth performed poems that had first appeared on our pages. One reflected on trying to hold on to memories of Harlem summers, block parties, icy man on the corner, and neighbors who felt like family, as urban renewal reshaped the neighborhood around them. Another questioned why decisions about redevelopment were so often made without the voices of the young people who would inherit those changes. Watching their words move from the page to the stage, I realized that evening was about much more than publishing a magazine. It was about creating a space where young people could practice democracy by telling the truth about the communities they know best.

UbuntuHarlem is an exercise in democracy.

Every issue asks young people to listen and think critically before responding. To collaborate across different experiences. To recognize that another person’s story has value, even when it is nothing like their own.

Those are democratic habits.

Not because they produce unanimous agreement, but because they produce something more important: the willingness to remain in conversation despite disagreement.

That willingness shaped my own life. At the African Leadership Academy and later during another semester abroad in Penang, Malaysia, with Tilting Futures, I spent countless hours in conversation with young people whose histories, governments, and daily realities differed profoundly from my own. We debated colonialism, educational systems, ethics of punitive discipline for young people, religious ideologies, and most importantly ways of collective action. We often disagreed. But we never treated disagreement as failure. We treated it as an invitation to understand one another more deeply and explain different viewpoints. I returned home realizing that democratic resilience is not built because everyone reaches consensus. It is built because people continue to engage one another even when consensus feels impossible.

That lesson feels increasingly urgent in the United States.

Young people are often described as the future of democracy. I disagree.

We are already shaping it.

I’ve seen democracy in volunteer editing sessions as Harlem teens debate which stories deserve to be told and amplified. I’ve seen it when contributors challenge one another’s assumptions while remaining committed to telling a shared story about their community. I’ve seen it in neighborhood association meetings where residents refuse to let decisions about Harlem be made without input from the entire community, including young people. These are not rehearsals for citizenship. This is democracy in practice.

If we invite young people into democracy only on Election Day, we shouldn’t be surprised when many feel disconnected from it the rest of the year.

The question isn’t how to convince young people that democracy matters. It’s how to build a democracy that consistently demonstrates that young people matter.

That means investing in local journalism that highlights community voices. It means protecting public housing, libraries, parks, schools, and community centers where relationships grow across differences. It means treating art, storytelling, and shared history as civic infrastructure rather than cultural luxuries. It means creating opportunities for young people not simply to inherit democracy but to start the conversation about what democracy means to them and where it shows up in their lives.

Most importantly, it means measuring democratic health by more than voter turnout numbers or approval ratings.

A thriving democracy is one where communities solve problems together—where every generation believes it has the responsibility, access, and power to shape what comes next. Gentrification threatened to erase the spaces, stories, and relationships that made Harlem feel like home. UbuntuHarlem was our response, bringing young people together to preserve our community’s narratives and prove that protecting a neighborhood begins with protecting the people and stories that define it.

When I think about what that looks like, I don’t picture the halls of Congress. I picture the group chats that started when we created UbuntuHarlem. I picture papis—the neighborhood’s older men—sitting in white plastic chairs on Lenox Avenue. They aren’t seats of political power. No legislation was written there, and no elections were decided there. But this is where neighbors watched over children who weren’t their own, where conversations stretched from afternoon into evening, and where people learned they belonged to one another before they ever belonged to a political party.

Democracy will not thrive because we have perfected our institutions. It will thrive when we remember that institutions are only as strong as the relationships, people, and places that sustain them.

Ubuntu taught me that if democracy is going to survive the end of this decade and beyond, then our greatest responsibility is not simply protecting our system of government. It is rebuilding our capacity to choose one another, again and again.