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We asked Maria Jose Arango Torres, a student at Northwestern University and an intern with the Latino News Network, to share her thoughts on what democracy means to her and her perspective on its current health.
Here’s her insight on the topic.
I didn’t inherit American democracy. I was made an accessory to it. As a young adult raised in the United States with limited legal protections, I’ve watched my presence in this country debated, politicized, and dehumanized. As a child, I saw that those who looked like me weren’t choosing the leaders—we were the subjects of their campaigns.
According to the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment guarantees the American people the right to believe, speak up, and hold the government accountable when it fails to represent all. In early April, international students at U.S. universities faced detention and visa threats after speaking out during Gaza solidarity protests. These cases illuminate American democracy: speaking out against the logic of racism, which is genocide according to Martin Luther King Jr., triggers government enforcement to threaten those without racial and ethnic privileges under the First Amendment.
Still, as a naturalized citizen, I remain suffocated by American democracy. Because I care to speak out against racist and genocidal ideologies freely, but I fear that practicing my freedom of speech will be an impediment to walking at my graduation. Under the Trump administration, American democracy has only proven what I have witnessed all my life: low-income queer brown women do NOT have a voice in American democracy because they were never made to have one. A democracy does NOT continue in the absence of voices but in the creation of many. And it is clear that American democracy, from its founding until the present, continues to exist at the cost of chaining colored bodies.
In January, when the ICE raids began, my sleep began to decrease. Later on, my therapist told me my insomnia could be PTSD from being an undocumented child. When I gained the privilege of receiving documents to be recognized as a full “American citizen,” my experience tied to my identities did not leave. Becoming a naturalized citizen did not erase the clouds of inferiority the U.S sprang on me for being an undocumented child: With nine weeks left from finishing my journalism degree at Northwestern, I still don’t feel smart enough, because I spent my life in places catered to the white and wealthy. The further I move from my community, the closer my access to a higher quality of life becomes — because the slave owner and colonizer did not make a democracy for my community to have privilege solely for being.
Adrienne Scheide, former Northwestern University Feminist president and my colleague, earlier in June, had to find a lawyer at the risk of dismantling the logic of racism and homophobia. “This is social policy to help and educate others. This is human development. This is learning science. This is education. We educate not just with one voice, but with the perspectives of many identities and many communities. We need diverse voices. We need Indigenous voices, Black voices, Asian, Arab, Latinx, Jewish, low income, disabled, lesbian, gay, bisexual, but especially in this current moment, transgender voices.” said Scheide “We need the voices of those who are facing the risk of their visas being revoked, those who are facing the risk of being deported or held in detention facilities by ICE, immigrants, children being taken from their families, their homes, and students who have similarly been detained, student activists who have voiced perspectives that are not approved of those who have spoken out about the atrocities occurring in Palestine. Our struggle for civil liberties is not separated. We are currently experiencing a collective attack on diversity, free speech, and higher education. But there is always hope. There is always resistance. When we need it most, we lean on each other, we protect each other, and we uplift each other when we need it. Maintain your empathy and speak up, even when your voice shakes. person, no statement, no order can take away the community.”
Scheide was raised in Wisconsin and saw the opportunity to use her privilege and remember her graduation as a marker when she overcame the fear to speak up in our government.“The beautiful thing about change is the certainty that you can change as well. No Moment. No person, no one's perception of you defines you” said Scheide.
The constitution does not matter in American democracy when you are NOT white. On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court made a decision that could help President and convicted felon Trump move forward with his plan to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and temporary immigrants. The Court didn’t decide whether Trump’s order is legal. Instead, it ruled that lower court judges can’t block a policy nationwide unless it directly affects the people who sued. This means Trump’s policy is still paused for now, but only for a short time—30 days—while legal battles continue. If put in place, the policy could mean children of color born in the U.S. would not automatically become citizens, which could leave some of them stateless.
The U.S. was a Brown family’s home first. If America had a true democracy, I could be my whole self. A democracy would amplify the facts, unlike the current administration. The attack on undocumented immigrants is not about coming the “right way.” The Founding Fathers are often portrayed as thieves and are sometimes associated with human trafficking. Racism has always been used by the white and wealthy to disguise their own sense of inferiority by classifying others as “inferior,” acquiring more, and incentivizing violence. When history changes, American democracy will count everyone, especially those of color, free from racist, dissatisfied, white, wealthy men like Trump, opening the doors to the American dream.
However, in the present, Trump exposes the reality of my voice in American democracy, and I am proven that because I did not inherit the privileges of the founding fathers, my voice is treated as if it matters not. No Northwestern degree or higher acquisition of privilege will erase my sense of inferiority, informed by the treatment of identities I did not choose to have in American democracy.
Suzetti Ueno-Dasilva, a rising senior and pre-med student at Northwestern, became my closest friend because I met her in Bridge. This program prepares low-income students and students of color for a summer before their first year. She grew up in Fresno, California, as a Japanese American and a first-generation American of Guinea-Bissau descent. Ueno-Dasilva attended Edison High School after transferring to pursue a better education. “After I got to those spaces, it was segregated. A lot of the white and wealthier students were separated from the students who lived in the neighborhood of my high school. So I had very little exposure to different people within my high school experience,” said Ueno-Dasilva.
According to the 2020 Census, the Hispanic or Latino community is 50.6% of the Fresno population. Being raised in Fresno, Ueno-Dasilva grew up watching the brown community nurture jobs in agriculture. “Fresno didn't have a large Japanese or even African population, so it was kind of hard to assimilate into either of those spaces. So I identified as, like, my own, ” said Ueno-Dasilva. “ There is also another stigma of biracial people being too proud of the fact that they are biracial, which is another whole thing. But in Fresno, I wasn't really concerned, or I wasn't really revolving around the fact that I was biracial, but it was more like I was a person of color.”
To Ueno-Dasilva, American democracy is her immigrant parents. “My parents were more American than me, even though I was born here. I feel like they truly worked to obtain that status,” said Ueno-Dasilva.
American democracy can be a democracy when it begins to count all people living in its “democracy.”
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.