Recently, Louisiana Republican State Senator Jay Morris hurled a racial slur at the Executive Director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, Dadrius Lanus. I noted the party’s official response on social media as it was shared by esteemed journalist Robert Mann. It was clear, and it was correct. What was less clear, and what has been bothering me ever since, was the quieter conversation that happened in the comments beneath that posted statement.

I commented regarding our Democratic party’s leadership’s absence at the No Kings rallies. They have been largely silent as the Resist movement has grown within our state. A fellow progressive, a Black woman I respect, told me that the No Kings protests were not a hill Black people were willing to die on. Those hills, she said, were reserved for the long fight against racial oppression. I want to be honest that her hesitation is not ignorance. It comes from hard experience. Movements organized around abstract constitutional language have a history of fading before the work is done, leaving Black communities exposed while white allies move on to the next cause. That wariness is earned. But I have to say it plainly: I think the framing is wrong this time, and I think the misunderstanding it reflects is one of the most dangerous fractures on the left right now.

There is no separate hill.

I was at the No Kings protests. The crowds were Black, brown, and white. But it did seem to skew largely older and white. No one was beaten. No one was killed. But what we were marching against is not separate from the fight against racial oppression. It is all the same fight.

The MAGA leadership is gerrymandering congressional districts in plain sight, surgically carving Black voters out of representation. That is not adjacent to racial oppression. That is racial oppression, dressed in legislative language and signed into law. To say the No Kings movement is not worth Black people’s time is to misread what those protests are actually about. They are about the right to vote, the right to be counted, and the right to live under a government whose authority comes from all of us, and not from a would-be king with a Sharpie, a grievance, a priority of expanding his own family’s wealth, and both the morals and interior design taste of Saddam Hussein.

There is something else worth saying, and it is harder, so I want to say it carefully. The Democratic Party is not the Black party. It never was. It is not the NAACP. It is the party that believes, imperfectly, unevenly, and sometimes too quietly, that every American is entitled to the full protection of the Constitution. When we let ourselves talk as if the party should only show up for Black Americans, or as if Black Americans should only show up when an issue is coded racial, we hand a rhetorical gift to the people who have spent decades telling white voters that the Democratic Party is “for them, not for you.” I have been hearing that trope my entire white life. It is a lie. It is meant to divide us, and it has been brutally effective. Progressives of every color should refuse to repeat any version of it.

I will say something hard to my own side, too. The leadership of the Louisiana Democratic Party is not showing up the way this moment demands. I don’t say that to scold. I say it because we cannot ask ordinary people to risk their bodies in the street while our official leaders hold meetings about messaging. When the executive director of our state party is the target of a slur from a sitting senator and our only visible response is a press release, our friends and neighbors notice. The other side notices, too.

The Constitution is not self-enforcing. It is a piece of paper that becomes real only when Black and white and brown citizens, urban and rural, religious and secular, native-born and naturalized, agree to stand for it together. The MAGA movement understands the math of disunity better than we do. They are counting on us to look at each other and see strangers. They are counting on us to argue about whose hill is whose while they take the whole mountain.

So here is what I want to say to every progressive reading this, especially the ones who are tired, scared, or quietly considering sitting the next one out. We are on the same hill. The fight for democracy and the fight against racism are not two fights. They are one fight, and they always have been. Show up for the voting-rights march and you are showing up for civil rights. Show up for the civil rights vigil and you are showing up for democracy. The MAGA movement has never confused the two. They attack voting rights and civil rights in the same breath, with the same legislation, toward the same end. We should at least be as clear about our own side as they are about theirs.

We do not have the luxury of separate hills. We have one country, one Constitution, and one another. That has to be enough. We have to make it enough.