By Jakari Holland,
Founder, Mississippi Access Project,
I grew up surrounded by museums, even when there was no admission sign at the door. The streets of my Atlanta neighborhood were exhibits of their own. Houses, schools, neighborhood stores and disparities told stories we rarely stopped to question. The dangerous thing about inequity is how ordinary it can become. Sometimes it becomes part of the scenery, something you walk past every morning until you inherit a reality you were never taught to question.
It was not until I got older that I started questioning what I had once accepted. Stacey Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign was one of the first elections that showed me how political systems worked in real time. I watched communities like mine organize and put their faith in the possibility of change. I also saw the discouragement that followed when the outcome they fought for did not come. Still, people organized. They registered voters and built political participation in communities where I had not grown up seeing that as the norm.
That stayed with me when I moved to Mississippi, where I recognized something familiar: familiarity being mistaken for inevitability. A process can become so familiar that we stop imagining it could work any other way.
Young people are always being told to get involved. Vote. Volunteer. Show up. Make your voice heard. But somewhere between being told to participate and trying to lead, I learned there was an unspoken condition: young people are often welcomed into democracy as long as we participate in ways already chosen for us. We can work on the event or knock on doors, but when it is time to organize, set the agenda or question how something has always been done, our perspectives can suddenly carry less weight. Maybe that is because young people have an inconvenient habit of asking: Why? Why is this the process? Why has this become normal? And if another way is possible, why are we waiting?
I have been fortunate to have adults and mentors who have poured into me. Their investment helped me enter spaces I once could not imagine. But mentorship and trust are not always the same thing. We call young people the leaders of tomorrow while sometimes struggling to trust them to lead today. That contradiction became harder for me to ignore this summer. At Harvard, I spent weeks studying public policy and talking about equity. Then I returned to Mississippi, where the inequities I was learning to describe academically were not theoretical. They were present in the communities and systems people navigate every day.
I was tired of becoming better at describing inequity while feeling powerless to confront it. One question followed me home: What good is learning to identify inequity if I return home and become accustomed to it? I wanted to build something that gave other people a way to confront it with me.
That desire became the Mississippi Access Project, or MAP. I found MAP because I believe in what can happen when young people organize around the conditions they actually experience. Our work centers on two voter-access priorities: online voter registration and expanded opportunities for early in-person voting. MAP is working toward 30,000 signatures while building a coalition across Mississippi campuses and communities.
But I wanted MAP to be more than a set of policy goals. I wanted young people to have the freedom to organize around the problems affecting their communities in ways that make sense for our generation. I was nervous. There is vulnerability in questioning established systems as a young Black man in Mississippi. I wondered whether people would take us seriously and whether we would have the resources or relationships to make the idea work.
At first, MAP was an idea I was asking other people to believe in. Then people started showing up. At Jackson State University alone, students collected 1,000 signatures in just two days. Over four days, we helped register 500 students to vote. Those numbers mattered to me not simply because of how quickly we reached them, but because of what they represented: young people coming together and choosing to participate.
Somewhere in those four days, I realized I was no longer carrying this idea by myself.
Organizing on my own campus has shown me another side of voter access. I have watched my peers make a mistake on a registration form and start over, sometimes more than once. You can see the frustration build because they want to get it right. Young people are often labeled politically apathetic, but that is not what I have seen. Students come to us wanting to learn and ask questions about a process many are navigating for the first time. The issue is not always whether we care, but whether we have been given the tools to participate.
We cannot talk about voter access without talking about the conditions people live under. Growing up around poverty taught me that something being available does not necessarily make it accessible. A right may exist equally on paper while the time, transportation and resources required to exercise it do not. In Mississippi, where 17.8 percent of residents live in poverty, that distinction matters.
But registration is only one part of access. It also includes whether communities can translate participation into representation. That question carries weight in Mississippi, where 36.8 percent of residents are Black and debates over the state’s political maps are happening in real time.
On Oct. 1, I plan to be at the Mississippi State Capitol for the final public redistricting hearing, where Mississippians will have an opportunity to speak about the future of the state’s political maps. For me, showing up is part of the same work as registering someone to vote. Having a political right and being able to meaningfully exercise it are not always the same thing, a distinction that has shaped what I study and how I lead.
Research gives us reason to take registration design seriously. Mississippi’s process also stands apart nationally: 42 states and Washington, D.C., offer online voter registration, while Mississippi does not. Jinhai Yu’s 2019 study in Social Science Quarterly, using Current Population Survey data from 2000 through 2014, found that states implementing online voter registration experienced about a three-percentage-point increase in young-voter turnout during presidential election years. One reform cannot solve every participation problem, but the finding shows why the design of registration deserves attention.
The more I organize, the less I recognize the cliché that young people do not care about politics. Malcolm X’s warnings about the power of the media to shape public perception stay with me when I think about what people see when they look at my generation. A student registering voters between classes or driving somebody to the polls might never become the image people associate with young people and politics.
But invisibility is not inactivity.
James C. Scott helped me recognize a pattern in something I had already witnessed. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, he calls it the “hidden transcript,” the conversations that happen outside the view of those with greater power. Our generation has them too, from dorm rooms and group chats to late-night Face Times where we say what frustrates us and imagine what we would change.
Our political consciousness does not begin when somebody hands us a microphone.
Organizing gives those conversations somewhere public to go. What begins in a group chat can eventually become hundreds of people putting their names behind the same concern.
I have watched that happen through MAP. I have trained young volunteers who wanted to participate but simply did not know where to start. Sometimes people who already care simply need a pathway from frustration to action. There is a long tradition of young people building those pathways, including the youth-led organizing of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. Our historical moment is different, but young people did not suddenly become stakeholders in American democracy when my generation arrived.
The way we organize has changed. A message can move across campuses in minutes, and a video can reach thousands of people before an organization ever holds its next meeting. But reaching people is not the same as organizing them. What happens online has to lead somewhere beyond the screen. A post can start a conversation, but the real work is turning that conversation into action.
Founding MAP has changed what leadership means to me. Leadership is not getting everyone in a room to think exactly alike. I am learning how to bring together people with different perspectives who can still recognize something they collectively believe deserves attention. More than anything, I am learning that courage feels different when you are not standing alone.
I still think about neighborhoods as museums. They preserve choices generations made before us. Some are worth celebrating. Others became so embedded in everyday life that we learned to walk past them without asking why.
Democracy is an inheritance too. But I refuse to confuse inheritance with instruction.
We can inherit a system without believing every part of it must remain untouched. We can respect those who built before us while still asking what they could not finish. Young people already have voices and lived experiences worth bringing into public life. What I am watching now is what happens when we find the courage to use those voices together.
Maybe that is how the exhibit changes. One generation finally stops walking past what every generation before it was taught to call normal.
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