Sayu Bhojwani will make her Amphitheater debut with her lecture at 10:45 a.m. today, but she’s no stranger to Chautauqua — Bhojwani was one of the featured presenters at the Institution’s first-ever Forum on Democracy in October 2023.
Now, she joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series with a discussion on lifting up the voices and perspectives she has championed her entire career, demonstrating how the contributions of historically marginalized groups help us “rise together” as an American community.
Throughout her career, Bhojwani has activated change in nonprofit and government settings, founding and leading three organizations: South Asian Youth Action, the first organization in the United States specifically focused on supporting youth who trace their ancestry to the Indian subcontinent; New American Leaders, which supports first- and second-generation Americans to run, win and lead in public office; and Women’s Democracy Lab, which she started in 2021 to support women of color and Indigenous women, post-election.
“The founding fathers may have envisioned a representative democracy ‘by the people, for the people, and of the people,’” Bhojwani wrote in her 2018 book, People Like Us: The New Wave of Candidates Knocking at Democracy’s Door. But the “people like us,” she wrote, aren’t who America’s early leaders had in mind. “… By our founders’ standards, American democracy is working as planned, serving the needs of the wealthy and well-connected. But by everyone else’s standards, American democracy is broken.”
To course-correct, she wrote, “we must foster a democracy that is built on our country’s original ideals of freedom and justice, one that is more inclusive and representative of people like us.”
Bhojwani, who was New York City’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, is currently a Leader in Residence at the Moynihan Center at the City University of New York and an Open Society Foundations Equality Fellow. In People Like Us, she breaks down demographics — in 2018, white people made up 63% percent of the U.S. populations; Latinx people, 16%, and African Americans 13%. Asian Americans made up 5% of the population, and the remaining 3% identified as mixed race, or other. But only 9.4 percent of elected officials in Congress were African American, 8.5% were Latinx, and 3.3% were Asian American. The representation gap extended beyond Congress, and Bhojwani wrote that the gap “between who Americans are and who are leaders are” isn’t by coincidence; rather, it’s “an intentional product of history and systemic white supremacy.”
