Why Presence Is Not Power And How To Tell The Difference
Watch my conversation with Rashad Robinson on his new book, From Presence to Power, and what it actually takes to win the fights that matter
For a lot of people right now, there’s this overwhelming sense that no matter how loud we get, how many of us march, how many posts go viral, nothing actually changes. I, myself, have wondered if my efforts were worth the fight at times. But I also think helplessness is the single most dangerous feeling because it’s exactly what the powerful are counting on.
That’s why the arrival of my friend Rashad Robinson’s new book, From Presence to Power, feels like the exact answer this moment demands. His book answers the questions sitting underneath all that exhaustion: why do we keep showing up and keep losing anyway? And what would it take to win? So I couldn’t wait to have him on the show!
Rashad spent two decades at the highest levels of two of the most defining movements of our time — the fight for racial justice and LGBTQ rights. He ran Color of Change for nearly fourteen years, building it into one of the most influential racial justice organizations in the country. Before that, Rashad led media programs at GLAAD, helped redefine the role of local prosecutors, took on Big Tech and Hollywood and co-led the largest corporate advertising boycott in history. There is not a movement for progress in my adult lifetime that he hasn’t been central to. And in this book, he distills all of it — the wins and the losses — into one simple idea.
We’ve fallen for the fallacy that being seen is the same as being powerful. The marches, the hashtags, the awareness and the followers — that presence feels like the world is finally watching. But it’s not the win. Power is the leverage to change the rules and force people in authority to do what they don’t want to do. The left, Rashad argues, keeps mistaking one for the other. We treat attention as if it were leverage then wonder why the progress we celebrate keeps getting rolled back.
We won Roe v. Wade and believed it to be settled law while the right built the courts and cases to take it back. We celebrated the Voting Rights Act for decades — the right spent the next sixty years working toward the day the Supreme Court would gut it. We won Brown v. Board of Education and, as Rashad points out, many of our schools are more segregated now than they were before it. Each time, we mistook the ruling for the finish line. But a ruling is presence. Holding it takes power — and the right never stops building theirs.
The other thing the book does is take you into rooms where it all happens — and it’s worse than you think. Rashad told me how Chuck Schumer, right after Trump won in 2016, waved off warnings that Republicans would blow up the rules to pack the Supreme Court. Not to worry, Schumer assured, Senator Orrin Hatch was “an institutionalist” who’d never kill the filibuster for court nominees. Guess what Republicans did anyway? Killed it months later and went on to confirm three Trump justices — the majority that would eventually overturn Roe. That’s the trap: our side kept faith while theirs kept score.
Meanwhile, Rashad was walking into Facebook to confront the company over civil rights violations, wearing a badge that read “No NDA” because he’d refused to sign the nondisclosure agreement they wanted. It was the one scrap of leverage he had in a building that belonged to them. And that’s the book’s whole thesis: when you’re in a dialogue, they just want to keep talking to you; when you’re in a negotiation, you can actually make power move.
Being able to turn attention into leverage is the entire reason I do this work. It’s the bet behind everything COURIER is building — newsrooms in states across the country, reporting made for the platforms people are actually on, projects dedicated to dismantling the Epstein class. Presence isn’t power, but it can become it.
Watch our full conversation and tell me where in your own life have you been settling for presence when you could be building power.
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