On July 16, 2026, Murmuration brought together leaders, organizers, creators, and journalists at The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice for America 251 & Beyond, a forward-looking conversation about the kind of America we want to build over the next 250 years. Across seven lightning talks exploring belonging, community, joy, identity, agency, nation, and hope, speakers Murmuration’s Chief Research Officer Sarah Stamper, Alex Johnston, Amanda Litman, Cord Jefferson, Astead Herndon, Daria Dawson, Murad Awawdeh, and Jason Green offered distinct perspectives on the people, relationships, and communities that shape American civic life. Together, their reflections challenged us to look beyond the current moment and imagine what becomes possible when we invest in the conditions that allow communities to thrive.
About Astead Herndon
Astead W. Herndon is the host of the "America, Actually" podcast at Vox.com where he also serves as an editorial director, leading coverage on American politics. Previously, Herndon spent seven years at The New York Times, where he covered national politics and hosted the acclaimed podcast The Run-Up. A graduate of Marquette University, Herndon serves on the board of advisers for the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
He has been recognized with several accolades in media and journalism: he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, listed as a finalist for the Toner Prizes and the Livingston Awards, and was part of the Times' 2020 election team that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prizes. Herndon has received the Distinguished Journalist Award from DePaul University and was recently named the 2025 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. He is also a political analyst for CNN.
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hey y'all, I'm so excited to be here. I'm going to start with a little story, as to be expected. On June 5th, 2020, just weeks after the murder of George Floyd, my life changed from an unexpected source: a tweet, in fact, from Gushers the candy, which I think about all the time. I go as far as to say it's actually one of the greatest sentences ever recorded. The tweet read, “Gushers would not be Gushers without the Black community and your voices. We are working with Fruit by the Foot to create space and amplifying that. We see you. We stand with you. We hear you.”
Now, the reason this tweet is so important is because I remember exactly where I was at the time because I remember thinking to myself really clearly, “What does that mean? Why was the candy amplifying my voice? Gusher sees me. Is that something I even want?” It was so clearly to me a distillation of the moment, a time when identity was talked about, almost always in a collapsing fashion.
We were all defined exclusively by our race, our gender, our sexuality. And words like intersectionality became a guise for what felt to me like the oppression Olympics. And we crowded out so much space for nuance in the process.
When I became a journalist, I knew certain identities would matter. I never set out to be objective because I was more focused on being fair, being transparent, and being accurate. And the sum of it, if the sum of that work adds up to something that was biased, I was OK with that. I never pretended that my lens as a reporter was not informed by my identity as a Black person, as a young person, or even more privileged identities like being male or able-bodied or straight.
But in a decade of political reporting, I've come to see other identities as mattering just as much. I've never felt more Protestant than when I worked at the Boston Globe. I've never felt more Midwestern than when I worked at the New York Times. All the pieces matter. The question I get most about my work is, “What it's like being Black at a Trump rally?”
And trust me, I've got some real stories about it. I can tell you about Trump's Tulsa rally in 2020, getting kicked out of a pizza shop. One time I went to Woodstock for Trump fans in northern Arizona. Crazy.
But the story I think about the most and the thing I think most matters to this group is actually one that happened in Mason County, Texas, a small town in the hillside of Texas, just 110 miles northwest of Austin. It was weeks after the 2020 election, and I had convinced a group of Trump supporters to let me go to church with them because I wanted to listen as they prayed to God to overturn the election. I came back to their house afterward at their invitation. We drank lemonade, we chitchatted, and we actually had a great time.
But it was at this point in the conversation that race and identity came up. The husband called the BLM protesters the N-word, and he said, “If these protesters come here, if they go tearing stuff up, I guarantee you they won't be in this town long because we'll string them up and we'll send them out of here and it won't be the same way they came in after that.”
Now, I included that quote in the story. I have to. But when it came out, obviously that was the big focus of the work. But I was consumed by something else. I thought maybe I had done the same thing I was accusing others of because if I thought about the rest of my day with that family, the lemonade, the church service, the Christian devotional they gave me as a present, I wondered if that quote distilled them into an unfair identity as racist, bigots rather than the full nuance of the day. In fact, it was this exact experience of repeatedly meeting people on the roads who I felt were more complex than a single quote that pushed me to think about audio journalism and now towards YouTube and video. And my work at Vox and our podcast America, Actually, we seek to talk about our shared identities beyond partisan labels. And by focusing on America's politics beyond Donald Trump, I think we are better able to understand the differences that are happening in our society from the bottom up rather than the top down.
We prioritize marginalized groups that are often overlooked: faith-based minorities, generational divides, and ignored working-class immigrants. But we don't simply highlight those as differences between us, but to underscore our shared identity as outsiders to a political process that wishes to exclude us all.
Which brings me to my other aha moment, besides the Gushers tweet. I was actually in a staff meeting at my previous job and was focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Journalists from across the newsroom were all asked to complete a survey, also of which I think about a lot.
I asked you the same question they asked us. Agree or disagree? Journalists should cover stories that come from their personal perspective.
Now, I don't know if you disagree or agree with that statement, but I personally was offended. I thought about those people in Texas and Tulsa, the southern Black Democrats I've covered for years, Latino voters out West. And I thought about how the truest identity, and I thought about if personal experience has actually eclipsed the reporting process, then it feels like I'm not a journalist at all. I am informed by identity, but I'm guided by curiosity, and that feels to me like what matters most. Thank you all.