A More Perfect Union Starts Here

Born John Roger Stephens, Legend has more than lived up to his stage name — not just making Black history but also helping shape the future of America. The unapologetically political pop singer’s vision includes rethinking power structures, top to bottom. “Anytime there’s an opposing legislature in office, it’s nearly impossible for the president to enact their agenda,” Legend laments on The Carlos Watson Show. His solution? Follow nations such as Canada and Australia that use a parliamentary system, one in which the winning party takes both the executive and legislative branches in national elections — making it easier to quickly pass meaningful laws with less obstruction from the opposing party. “When we go to other countries and we try to help them form a democracy, help them write their constitution,” Legend says, “we never tell them to get a president.”

The North Carolina Republican, who recently took office as the youngest member of Congress and is already making waves with his embrace of Donald Trump, declared on The Carlos Watson Show that this was “one of the coolest questions I’ve ever been asked.” His response was one that we also heard from a bunch of you: term limits. “On both sides of the aisle, you see these entrenched politicians, this entrenched political class who have a very narrow viewpoint of how the world should act,” Cawthorn says. “And because of that, you see very little change happening in our government. And so I think that if we could get term limits on Congress, we could get more fresh faces, more fresh ideas. And I’m not just saying younger people: I want a diverse representation inside of Congress.”

A seat at the table? Please. Shanti wants to knock over the table — which certainly makes for some interesting cooking. Her pioneering cuisine, dubbed “Afro-lachian,” connects her Appalachian roots with her love for African American food traditions. Each dish celebrates overlooked aspects of Black history, pushing fellow Southerners to contend with their assumptions. “The future of restaurants can’t look anything like what it has looked like,” she says. By building a new table, one that can reach across generations and ethnicities, Shanti is already paving the way.

Tearing down statues is one thing. But what if we made them better and more accessible? The founder of Movers and Shakers NYC, Cantave is developing a platform to rewrite Black and brown history in school curricula. His app, which is scheduled to launch widely this month, has a catalog of “heroes you never learn about in school” — women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community and more. Students use the app to select an underrepresented icon and then advance to doing assignments on them, with the ability to create augmented reality “monuments.” They can take selfies with their chosen icon, download the selfies and share. “If children get nuanced education while growing up, it helps them form informed decisions and choices when they grow up,” Cantave says.

Rip off the Band-Aid. Seriously, just do it, Lakshmi insists. That may seem like an all-too-easy prescription, yet many resist the idea of fully reckoning with America’s complicated history. “As our society contends with all of the atrocities and sins involved in forming this country, we will never really, truly heal the wound,” she says on The Carlos Watson Show. Not until the wound gets some oxygen, and doctors can apply the medicine and perform the surgeries necessary for healing. That may take some cutting and, yes, maybe even an injection of some new blood. But civil society is “an organic thing,” Lakshmi argues. “It has to be maintained. It’s not one and done. It's not like, ‘OK, we fixed that. Now we’re going to go over here.’” Adjusting to that reality means creating space for difficult discussions and accepting the need for change.

It may take an entire generation, this OZY reader admits, but he thinks it is necessary: America must treat education, from kindergarten through college, “like we treat childhood vaccines, as a requirement of being part of our society.” It’s an interesting suggestion, and not just because there is currently a significant contingent of young Americans who might not even agree that vaccines should be mandatory. While most parts of the country have truancy laws requiring kids to show up to some form of school, there are plenty of loopholes and too many students still slip through the cracks. Perhaps if education were considered a civic duty — and intelligence promoted as a force for social good — resetting America wouldn’t be so difficult.