In Harper's Bazaar, Grammy award-winning musical artist, activist and Atlanta native Janelle Monáe interviews Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on her book, voter suppression and how Black America can overcome it in this week's Sunday Long Read.
JANELLE MONÁE: In your book Our Time Is Now, you write about what you call the New American Majority—the people of color, young people, moderates and progressives, who galvanized behind you and your race for governor of Georgia in 2018. You believe these folks are a key force in the upcoming federal elections. In the time between when you wrote the book and when it was published in June, we saw our country gripped by this pandemic. We’re all in the middle of Covid-19 right now, and we’re in a reckoning with racial justice and the stark and tragic effects of inequality. How do you feel this New American Majority has evolved or changed over the past six months?
STACEY ABRAMS: The full title of the book is Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, and I think that there has been nothing in our recent memory that has crystallized that subtitle more than the last six months. We are in a pitched battle driven by a public-health crisis, an economic collapse, and a reckoning with structural racism and systemic inequities, and the battle is not simply against those things. It is understanding that this New American Majority, because of how many of us there are and because of the proof points of our capacity, we have to know we’ve got the power to influence what happens next. We have to know we have a purpose, which has been revealed by what the pandemic has shown us about what is happening to Black and brown communities that are being decimated by Covid-19 and the economic inequities that are not only being visited upon our country writ large but upon those essential workers, who, by law or by practice, don’t have the ability to take care of themselves and have to stand on those front lines. And then a fair America—we have the right to demand equal justice under the law. We have the right to believe that Ahmaud Arbery should not have been murdered in the streets and that Rayshard Brooks should not have been killed by police. I wrote this book in 2019. I finished it up the first few days of 2020. I had no idea this is what was to come. But what I’ve learned from my parents and my grandparents and from the long sweep of history is that we have been waiting for this moment where our desires can be met with our capacity. That is this moment, and the New American Majority is how we do it.
JM: At one point in your book, you recount protesting emblems of the Confederacy while you were in college at Spelman [in Atlanta] in the early 1990s. I saw video footage of you burning the Confederate flag [at the time, the Georgia state flag contained a Confederate battle emblem]. How does it feel, 28 years later, to watch as names are finally being taken off buildings, flags are being burned, people are removing statues by themselves, and paintings depicting Confederate figures are coming down slowly but surely? Why do you think it took so long?
SA: In 2018, when I had the temerity to say that I did not believe in the public veneration of traitors to our country, which is what the Confederacy was, or that I didn’t believe that Stone Mountain should be a state monument—that we should have again a reckoning—I was vilified for it. And when I burned the Confederate flag, I had a permit for it, but when we burned that flag, it was because I grew up in Mississippi in the shadows of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis, where I watched people celebrate a man who tried to keep my people enslaved. And that’s just wrong. So I am grateful that we’re having this moment. But again, it goes back to this inflection point, this demographic change. The New American Majority is not simply a title—it’s a capacity issue. There are enough of us now who have known this for years, but our voices have come together as a chorus and we’re loud enough to be heard. I think that’s why we’re seeing this action. But I don’t want to dismiss the fact that we had people like Bree Newsome, who scaled that pole and took down that flag. [In 2015, Newsome was arrested after removing a Confederate flag on the grounds of the South Carolina State House.] Even though people were trying to give [then Governor] Nikki Haley credit in South Carolina, it was Bree Newsome who risked her freedom to do that. So we have had people who’ve been fighting this battle. But I think for the first time people believe that the battle can be won.
JM: Let’s talk about voter suppression. You’ve described voter suppression as a means of denying people “the most profound currency of citizenship: power.” What does American power look like to you today? And what should it represent?
SA: In a democracy, our ability to select those who speak for us comes from the right to vote. That’s what we have to remember. We live in a representative democracy. We don’t ask everyone to vote on everything. We say, “Pick some folks and let them focus on it so you can go about your life.” But if you can’t choose representation that sees you, that hears you, and that speaks for you, then the democratic part doesn’t really work. So my mission has been to ensure that the representation part meets the democracy part. We have a president who does not want democracy to work. He is a wannabe authoritarian populist who believes that his edicts should be law, that his incompetence should be unchallenged, and that accountability is for others. We have this responsibility to fight back against voter suppression because suppression is all about maintaining power for a small cadre of folks who have been afraid of sharing it from the beginning of our country. This is a nation built on voter suppression. When we started, white men who owned land could vote. If you were Black, you were a slave. If you were a woman, you were supposed to be silent. If you were Native American, you were invisible. Then in 1790 we decided to shut the gates and say no one else can come in. So we’ve spent 230 years trying to reclaim the promise that was in our Declaration of Independence, this promise of equality. But we can only reclaim it if we have the power of the vote. I know it can sound like a slogan or a really pale solution to all of these challenges, but in a democracy, you can’t give up the power you have trying to get the power you want.
JM: In many ways, it seems like we’re in a moment that is demanding change. How do we take advantage of that opportunity to actually bring about change?
SA: One thing I’ve always loved about your music is that you’re a truth-teller, and I think that’s got to be the approach we take to leverage this moment: We’ve got to tell the truth about what’s happening and tell the truth about how we fix it. I become frustrated when I hear people, in response to protesters in the streets, saying, “Just go vote,” because that’s not the only answer. I was a protester in the streets, and I protested at the ballot box—my parents raised me to understand you have to do both. They were activists because they knew that was the only way they would get the right to vote. And once they had the right to vote, they took us with them to vote and to protest because they wanted us to understand that it’s not enough to say what you want—you’ve got to demand that it be made true. So we have to be willing to stop simplifying this by pretending that we can elect a savior who will change the world or change the country. It won’t happen. We can elect people, who, if we hold them accountable, can make progress. But we’ve got to connect the dots.
I'm a big fan of Stacey's politics and of Janelle's music. It's excellent to see two Black women discuss politics like this and I find myself agreeing with the entire conversation, particularly Abrams's observations on white America putting the onus on Obama to be the savior in 2008.
When Obama responded with "We all have work ahead of us", something Black America was used to hearing and doing, but white America was not -- they thought merely electing Obama would "fix things" and they were off the hook for the results and it was Black America's responsibility now -- that's when white America turned on Obama and the Democrats in three straight federal elections. It was only because Mitt Romney was a terrible candidate and that Obama's charisma and the recovery was strong enough that he won in 2014 but Democrats across the country were wiped out in the backlash, leading to Trump.
That wasn't Black America's fault. We didn't elect Trump. But it apparently falls upon us to save the country from him now.
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