When I last sat down for lunch with Connie Rice it was 2023, and I was eager to get some assurance from the veteran civil rights attorney that the country was still firmly on the path of building a multiracial democracy.
A string of unprecedented events had shaken the country to the core — the election of Donald Trump, the COVID pandemic, the nationwide George Floyd protests against racism, Jan. 6. But surely, I thought, all these things together had produced lessons that would ultimately strengthen our resolve to be a better, more compassionate and inclusive nation. We had learned things. One thing we’d learned is that electing Trump was a terrible mistake, a crime against the national conscience that would not, could not, happen again.
Rice had her doubts.
“Do you know about Project 2025?” she said. “Have you read what’s in it?”
Yes, I knew about the 900-page manifesto by the Heritage Foundation that detailed a radical conservative takeover of the federal government, and of American culture, when the GOP took back the White House. I hadn’t read it in its entirety — who had? — but it seemed more like a MAGA fever dream than a serious plan. A scare tactic.
Rice paused for a moment, leaned over the table and said, with uncharacteristic grimness, “If he ever gets back in, it’s game over.”
I was startled. Not a setback or a challenge to all the progress made, which I was used to hearing, but game over? This was coming from someone whose life’s work, like that of most Black activists, is necessarily grounded in the belief that America is always moving, however slowly, towards justice. I surmised that Rice was being dramatic to make a point about never letting down your guard against the ever-present threat of oppression. Understood. But I left lunch a little uneasy: She didn’t actually believe he’d get back in, did she?
Three long years later, in the middle of Trump’s crushing second turn in office, that warning haunts me more and more. So I recently called Rice to see what she’s thinking now about the fact that her dire prediction has come to pass, with Trump, in countless ways, and, through a torrent of executive orders, pronouncing the whole game of multiracial democracy over. I was looking not for assurance this time, but advice. My main question: In the midst of such a bewildering calamity, with attacks on justice coming from every direction, what are we to do?
Again, Rice’s response caught me by surprise. She laughed — and not because anything about this moment is funny, but because everything is so extreme, so outrageously upside down, so darkly absurd, that it should be funny.
“What’s happening is not about logic, or policy, or fact,” she told me. “We can’t debate the issues anymore, so you have to counter all the outrageous GOP lies with something that penetrates, something that really exposes the hypocrisy — something like piercing humor.”
At 70, Rice hasn’t lost her sharp wit or penchant for pithy summations, even when describing the worst news. In her frankly bleak assessment of all that’s gone wrong, she’s still animated and passionate. It’s a hallmark of an illustrious career that has taken her from Western regional counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to big civil rights and public policy fights in L.A. that ranged from successfully suing for transportation justice for bus riders to winning equitable funding of LAUSD schools to rooting out racism in police departments.
Rice has a reputation for challenging the status quo, sometimes in unpopular and unexpected ways; back in 2011 she agreed that elected Black leadership in Compton was suppressing Latino representation in order to preserve its own shrinking power base, something she said white people did to Black people in another age — an observation met by Black leadership in Compton and elsewhere with deafening silence.
But these days Rice doesn’t even talk about race, she said. Not because it isn’t important, but because the second Trump administration has intentionally made it toxic and turned the whole meaning of civil rights on its head.
How then can you even pursue racial justice in such an atmosphere? I asked.
“You can’t pursue racial justice in a tyranny,” Rice said flatly. To me that means that the Civil Rights Movement as most Americans have understood it for the last 70 years doesn’t exist, at least for now. That’s hard to grasp.
That’s why Rice thinks that at this moment fighting for democracy, not justice, comes first.
“The order of battle has to be that, or we won’t be talking about racial justice or the Armenian genocide or trans rights or any of that stuff,” she said. “Those are policy debates; what we have now is power debates. First we have to get back to that place where you can debate it all.”
Overcoming tyranny, she added, requires first breaking through cultural barriers, which is really where racism lives.
“If you can’t get people’s filters cleared of that cultural crap, reinforcement of all the biases that are underpinned by racism, then you can’t get people to talk about what Bernie Sanders is talking about,” she said.
Like the Vermont senator and longtime progressive icon, Rice is incensed about the billionaire and big business takeover of America’s wealth, including funneling public money and resources into corporate profit, that has become increasingly open and unapologetic.
“It’s the real story of our decline that never gets told” by either party. But she said it’s the narrative we urgently need.
“I keep telling the Democrats, ‘Tell the story of reverse Robin Hood,’” Rice said impatiently. “It’s why MAGA people are hurting.”
The problem, as I see it, is that racial anxieties always tend to obscure or even obliterate economic truth. When Barack Obama was president, those anxieties soared and then reached a tipping point.
“The message had sunk in that colored people were going to be in charge, that, with Obama showing the way, we were headed toward a multiracial democracy and they might do to white people what’s historically been done to us so we’re not going any further. It stops here,” Rice said.
For the GOP that has meant stopping not just the rise of diversity, but destroying any path of prosperity for the masses — “no safety net, no path to upward mobility, be it college loans, mortgage help, health care,” said Rice. “They don’t want those things for everyday people.”
Not that attacking safety nets is anything new; that’s been going on since the New Deal.
“But you can’t sell attacking safety nets to American voters — vote for me, I’ll take away your jobs! — so they’ve got to lie,” said Rice.
She called proponents of Project 2025 who are oblivious to ongoing accusations of authoritarianism “constitutional arsonists who would burn America to save America.”
It is clear that their idea of America is not Southern California, which Rice said has had a multiracial democracy for 100 years. Sort of.
“It’s not perfect — we kind of tolerate each other,” she said. “It’s not a melting pot, it’s a bento box, an unmixed Cobb salad. Sometimes we do come together in multiracial pockets.”
Rice remains frustrated that in a place that’s been solidly blue for so long, things are not nearly as equal as they should be.
“Democrats couldn’t get a two-car funeral to the cemetery, they can’t execute to save their lives,” she said with more than a little contempt. “I know because I’ve sued them for 40 years, and I sued because they couldn’t get big stuff done — couldn’t get the schools built, couldn’t get LAPD to operate within some constitutional constraints. They’ve kicked the can on homelessness down the road for 50 years.”
While she isn’t offering solutions, Rice points to the massive public pushback against ICE brutality in Minnesota, L.A. and elsewhere as crucial to turning back tyranny. She also believes that Democrats and other pro-diversity Americans need what has become known as Project 2029 — a blueprint for a new direction for the U.S. that fully explains why things haven’t worked and, importantly, dismantles the right-wing mythology that has allowed reverse Robin Hood to flourish.
The blueprint would be written for a coalition that supports that vision — not the Obama “hope’ coalition, but “a democracy coalition that believes in a constitutional order with individual rights,” said Rice. That’s the reality when you’re going up against an administration so at odds with the principles of racial justice that Trump’s refugee policy is admitting white South Africans he falsely claims are victims of “white genocide.”
“How much clearer can you be?” Rice said, laughing with a kind of astonishment.
Our conversation took a contemplative turn as Rice recalled a famous quote.
“The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once said, ‘The old world is dying and a new one is struggling to be born; now is the time of monsters.’ And that’s what we’re in.”
Hardly reassuring. But empowering in the way that truth, however uneasy it makes us, always is.
