Jon Stojan
Image credit: Rashad Robinson
Rashad Robinson has a diagnosis for why so many advocacy campaigns fail to land: they are still communicating for an era that has already ended. Talking with Don Lemon this summer about his new book, the social justice leader said organizing has “very much moved from the what era to the who era,” a shift in which trust travels through people and the platforms they build rather than through the mastheads of legacy institutions.
The point carries weight because Robinson spent two decades testing it. He led Color Of Change for over a decade, directed media programs at GLAAD during the fight for marriage equality, and today, continues to counsel movement leaders, philanthropists, and businesses on how to turn attention into lasting influence. His book, “From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win,” arrives July 28 from One World, an imprint of Random House, and turns on a single premise: showing up is not the same as holding power.
The logic of the ‘who era’
Robinson’s distinction between the “what era” and the “who era” is a claim about how attention now moves. Under the older model, a message earned credibility from the outlet that carried it; a byline in a major paper conferred authority regardless of who wrote it.
Audiences today follow individuals they trust and keep returning because of the relationship rather than the letterhead. The person is the platform. Robinson pointed to Lemon himself, praising the way the anchor left cable news to build an independent audience that follows him across formats. “How people follow people and the trust that you’ve built with audiences,” Robinson told him, is the model movements have been slow to adopt. His argument is about where persuasion now happens and who controls the channel when it does.
Op-eds as one tool, not the whole plan
Robinson reserves particular skepticism for one habit he sees across social justice organizations. Their communications teams, he told Lemon, spend “weeks and weeks trying to get an op-ed placed that no one’s going to read rather than working to build audiences and engagements.” The labor goes toward a placement; the placement rarely reaches the people a campaign needs to move.
The math rarely favors the column. A single opinion piece runs once, competes with everything else published that day, and disappears into an archive. Robinson has been telling movement organizations to weigh that against a channel that reaches the same readers on a schedule, builds familiarity over months, and can ask an audience to do something specific. The op-ed treats media as a favor to request from a gatekeeper. The audience treats media as an asset to own.
The dependence cuts deeper than reach. A campaign that leans on borrowed platforms can be edited, ignored, or cut off at the moment it matters most, with no standing relationship to fall back on when an editor passes. An audience a movement has built for itself answers to no such gatekeeper.
That reframing sits at the center of how he now advises groups on structuring their communications work. The question is no longer which editor to pitch. It is which relationships a movement can build and hold directly, so that no gatekeeper stands between an organizer and the public they are trying to reach.
The table he built instead
Robinson stopped describing the shift and started practicing it. He launched Freedom Table in December 2025, a monthly conversation series produced with NewsOne, the Black-owned platform under Urban One. He framed the show plainly in his opening column: “a show for builders, not bystanders,” with roughly 30-minute episodes designed to break into segments that “travel across group chats, feeds, classrooms, and staff meetings”.
The guest list reflects the range Robinson works across: organizers, journalists, business leaders, strategists, and culture-makers. The subject matter refuses the usual advocacy script. The first episode examined crime television and its effect on the criminal justice system, and it opened with a question about how such programming shapes public assumptions rather than a lecture about what to stop watching. A later episode paired Robinson with voting rights leader Stacey Abrams to walk through the SAVE Act, restrictive voter identification rules, and the corporate enablers who fund officials working to limit the vote while issuing statements about valuing democracy.
Each episode returns to a set of questions Robinson keeps coming back to: who benefits from the current setup, where the points of pressure sit, and what would make an injustice unprofitable rather than lucrative. He has described the program as a push for connecting policy, culture, law, economic pressure, and narrative, so that movements stop, in his words, “fighting with one arm tied behind our backs.”
Freedom Table sits alongside a written newsletter, How We Win, and short explainer videos. Together they make up a small owned-media operation rather than a single show.
Narrative infrastructure as a form of power
For Robinson, owned media is one part of answering a problem he treats as a matter of power, not messaging alone. Movements operate, he has written, in “a lopsided media ecosystem” where opponents of progress win the daily contest for attention. His newsletter has argued that media and technology consolidation shapes public life, and that movements need “narrative infrastructure that belongs to us” rather than reach borrowed from platforms they do not control.
The same conviction runs through the book. Robinson devotes its closing chapters to what he calls the corridors of power: corporations, government, Hollywood, and Big Tech, the places where decisions get made every day. His campaign record gives the argument teeth. The book draws on his accounts of taking on Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech, pressing Hollywood over its storytelling, and helping launch the movement for progressive prosecutors. Media and technology, in his telling, are arenas that determine who gets heard, and occupying them directly beats petitioning owners who answer to different incentives.
Robinson has practiced that kind of cultural intervention for years. He tells the story of helping place same-sex wedding announcements in newspapers in 2005, long before marriage equality, putting couples on the page beside their neighbors and treating acceptance as ordinary. That campaign treated culture as the ground where a political fight would eventually be won.
Robinson wants funders to treat that infrastructure as a worthy investment. He has urged philanthropy to fund “the connective tissue” of movements, the measurement, enforcement, and cultural capacity that outlasts a single election cycle, rather than pouring money into work that evaporates once a campaign ends.
From analysis to action
Robinson’s own story explains why he treats representation as necessary but incomplete. Growing up in Riverhead, New York, he was often one of one or two Black students in his elementary classes.
Magazines like Ebony, Jet, and Essence, along with a show like “A Different World,” gave him nearly his only window into Black success beyond his town, he has said. He also grew up with very few visible examples of openly gay, successful Black adults around him. “I did not believe that was possible for me,” he told RiverheadLOCAL of a time before f such futures were made visible.
Visibility opened a door for him. It did not, on its own, change the rules. The book draws that line explicitly, casting presence as the visibility of marches, media attention, and popular issues, and power as the ability to change the rules that politicians and executives operate by. The gap between being seen and being able to win is the distance the book’s title names, and it explains why Robinson describes Freedom Table as an exercise in “moving people from analysis to action” rather than another venue for commentary. The show is built to hand its audience a task, not just a takeaway.
Whether movements follow him into audience-owned media is an open question. Building a durable channel takes patience and resources that a one-off op-ed does not, and few organizations are structured for the work. Robinson’s wager is that the investment is the only thing that scales. “Social change is the practice of making the impossible possible,” he writes, “and possibility is about one thing more than any other: power”. In the who era, by his account, that power begins with owning the room where people are actually listening.