A conversation with SRF keynote Nadine Smith, president and CEO of Color Of Change

Editor’s Note: Each issue, Assistant Editor Liz Hayes is interviewing people in the church-state separation movement. This month she sat down with Nadine Smith, who will be a keynote speaker at the Summit for Religious Freedom (SRF) April 25-27. Smith is the new president and CEO of Color Of Change. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: We are excited to have you as one of our keynote speakers for AU’s Summit for Religious Freedom (SRF) in April! Some of our members may not be familiar with your work — can you tell us a bit about your organization, Color Of Change?

Smith: Color Of Change was born in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where the federal government completely abandoned the Black community. There was an understanding that we needed to have a response that was rooted in communities, that we had to stand up for ourselves, we had to organize collectively.

Color Of Change, as the largest online racial justice organization in the country, has really understood how important it is to tell our stories. Not just as the victims of injustice, but as creative people who have endured, have learned to thrive, and who understand that our power comes from looking out for each other.

We’re storytelling people. It’s how we make meaning out of the world we live in. We’re living in a moment where so many platforms are owned by a handful of oligarchs who are not afraid or restrained by any moral framework from exploiting that. And so, Color Of Change is really committed to being a voice in that wilderness that can help make meaning out of the deluge that is intended to leave us feeling so overwhelmed that we can’t push back.

And yet, every time we do push back, we slow the machinery. And sometimes slowing it is enough to stop a bad thing from happening. I think of it as grains of sand. Everybody can throw at least one grain of sand into the cogs of the machinery, and you never know when it stops slowing down and comes to an abrupt halt.

The closer we are to the machine, instead of being afraid of it, we begin to see its weaknesses. And so much of that comes from storytelling, so much of it comes from the people who are brave in the face of it. The reason that [our opponents] seek to bring us low, to try to humble us all the time, is because they understand the power of our storytelling and the power of our community.

Before becoming president and CEO of Color Of Change in January, you were the founding executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ+ rights advocacy organization. How do you view the intersectional nature of civil rights work, and how does that apply to tackling the many challenges that our country faces now?

Smith: I went from an organization that focuses on the LGBTQ+ community and has a commitment to anti-racism, to an anti-racist organization that has a commitment to LGBTQ+ justice. There absolutely is a continuum. You can’t be against a certain kind of injustice and then be silent in the face of other injustice. You can’t say Black lives matter unless all Black lives matter.

Equality Florida is part of me. I spent nearly 30 years with that organization. I’ll always be a member, I’ll always be a donor. But for me, in this moment as we are watching democracy be dismantled, when I ask myself, ‘Where is the place that feels close to the ground, grassroots-driven, willing to take on the powerful, unafraid to challenge corporations?’ To me, Color Of Change was absolutely where I want to be in this fight.

I’m aware that the fight in front of us is different than the fight behind us. The fight ahead of us is one that not only affects us directly as people standing up against racism, but it is also what the country has to understand – that tyrants, authoritarians, always weaponize racism. They always look for scapegoats, whether it’s the LGBTQ+ community, or immigrants, their playbook is always the same.

We have to make sure that people are aware that the only way through is to stand together. Otherwise, they just pick us off one at a time. That’s their long-held strategy, and we’ve got to be smarter and learn from the past, but also adapt to the new world that we’re in. And that new world includes deepfake AI, where truth itself is under attack.

We know that disinformation is always part of the strategy to suppress the vote, to foment violence, to intimidate people. So we’re going to be an outpost of truth. We’re going to push back. We’re going to train people how not to fall for this deepfake AI. How to be responsible citizens of the online terrain, where most of us at this point are getting our information.

Church-state separation is one of the pillars of our democracy that is under attack right now. How do you connect with church-state separation?

Smith: For me, church-state separation has always been about freedom. It protects the right of people to practice their faith without government interference, and it protects people from having someone else’s theology imposed on them through law.

In Florida, we saw this all the time. They would wrap it in this idea of parents’ rights. No, this is about you indoctrinating children by compelling them to follow your very narrow religious beliefs. It’s about you removing from libraries books that don’t align with your very narrow religious beliefs. It is a supremacist idea that your religion is the only real religion.

When the state begins enforcing a particular religious worldview, it always ends up harming people who fall outside of that worldview, whether it’s religious minorities, Black and people of color communities, women, immigrants — it doesn’t matter. The moment that happens, you’re on the wrong side. If you’re banning books, you’re on the wrong side.

Protecting church-state separation is really about protecting democracy. And it ensures that our laws are grounded in fairness and equal protection, not in the religious doctrine of whoever currently holds power. We have to challenge that notion that your religious freedom allows you to punish people who don’t agree with you, who don’t believe what you believe.

In my previous role at Equality Florida, AU and Equality Florida linked arms many times in these fights, and we will need to link arms again.

A lot of people are finding this to be a dark place right now. What brings you joy?

Smith: The history of my family brings me hope. If you watch “Sinners,” that’s where my family’s roots are — Mound Bayou, the Mississippi Delta. My grandparents were sharecroppers. My grandfather was one of the organizers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union that organized sharecroppers when the droughts hit and they were left to die. My grandparents were part of the first interracial farming cooperative in the Mississippi Delta, navigating a world where they were trying to show Black and white people working together even as they were surrounded by the threat of Klan violence at all times.

It is in the history. My grandmother was one of the Black Angels, the nurses at Sea View Hospital in Staten Island who helped light the path for the treatment of tuberculosis. They were considered expendable, and yet they also held on to their own humanity. White nurses fled Sea View. They did not see the Black and brown, largely immigrant population as real people. But those Black nurses sat and played cards, read books, listened, and they noticed small things [that were helping patients improve]. And as the researchers and doctors began to discover how to treat tuberculosis, they point to those nurses and their compassion and their willingness to spend time with people that the white nurses had given up on as the turning point.

So for me, in these moments of darkness, when we see the consolidation of power in the hands of people without empathy, without care for the future, who dream of Mars, who dream of robot control, all of these dystopian things — I come back to the thing that always gives me hope, and that’s being in community with people, looking out for each other. We’re supposed to look out for each other.

I think everybody’s trying to find their way through a world where we keep being sold this bill of goods that it’s all about our rugged individualism, it’s all about us alone against nature, against the elements, against the world. When really, we want to sit around the campfire and tell stories, and look out for each other, and break bread together.

I’m going to be on the side of the campfire and looking out for each other and looking out for our neighbors. One of the themes that cuts across so many religions, the most elemental parts of what binds the world’s religions, for me, it’s people. Being in the presence of people, willing to stand in solidarity with each other.