Stacey Abrams: DEI is in America’s DNA, and when we let ourselves be siloed or treated as separate and divided because our differences are different, we allow those who revile those differences to pit us against one another instead of coming together, binding ourselves together under the banner of being proud Americans. And if we are proud Americans we will stand up for one another and stand up for the diversity of our nation, for the equity of opportunity, and for inclusion in the American Dream.

 

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Stacey Abrams. Abrams served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 until 2017, including 6 years as Minority Leader. When she ran for Georgia governor in 2018, she was the first Black woman to be a gubernatorial nominee by a major party.

 

Today she’s the Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics at Howard University and the CEO of the film company Sage Works Productions. She has also launched a number of organizations to protect and advance democracy, including Fair Fight Action, The Southern Economic Advancement Project, and most recently American Pride Rises. She has also just launched a new podcast from Crooked Media called Assembly Required.

 

Abrams is probably most famous for her political career and many people credit her organizing work for making Georgia a more politically competitive state. But she is also an accomplished lawyer. She has written 11 novels, including best sellers. And she has founded several successful businesses. All of that is to say that Abrams is not only smart, but also has a wide range of knowledge and interests.

 

So when she decides to focus her intellect and her energies on a new project it’s informed by both broad experience and intimate understanding of American politics. One project that Abrams is currently focused on, which you’ll hear about in this interview, is arguing for the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, and defending these values from attack. She’s leading a new organization on this, the American Pride Rises Network.

 

That name, American Pride Rises, is an appropriate one because Abrams is telling a story about American history and American identity that we can all take pride in. We’re used to thinking about the United States as a democratic republic where we, the people, govern ourselves. But as Abrams points out, diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamental values of democracy and they’ve been part of our national story from the very beginning.

 

Democracy is a form of government where all voices are included and the wisdom of our collective decision making is built on the diversity of perspectives. And as for equity, we’ve always sought to be a society where all citizens have a shot at success, that’s why we built public schools early in our nation’s history. We’re used to thinking of the American Dream in economic terms but it’s also a promise that hard work will be rewarded regardless of wealth, connections, or background.

 

Telling the American story that way doesn’t mean that we should ignore the sins of our past or that we should excuse ongoing failures to live up to our highest ideals, but it does give us a way to lay claim to those ideals, to say that the United States of America stands for something and that our country has always been the best version of itself when we’ve broadened the circle of whose voices and votes are counted, when we make space for citizens who don’t all look and think alike, and when we seek fairness for everyone.

 

Abrams argues that diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamental American values and that’s also how we understand democracy here at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our mission is advancing inclusive democracies. And really no society deserves the label democracy unless it’s also inclusive. The United States was founded on a beautiful vision of citizens collectively governing themselves. And we’ve come closer to that ideal as we’ve expanded the boundaries of citizenship and voting rights.

 

That’s how the Kettering Foundation sees democracy, and that’s one of the reasons we think Abrams’s voice is important right now. Not everyone sees it that way. Some people use the phrase DEI hire as an insult. There have been attempts to legislate against DEI in the majority of state legislatures and in the Federal Congress. And just within the last couple of years at least a dozen states have passed new anti-DEI laws. Many of these laws target public universities.

 

For example some laws ban universities from having offices, staff, or programs dedicated to DEI and others ban universities from considering demographic factors in admissions or employments decisions, including any use of diversity statements. Other laws ban teaching certain topics related to DEI in primary and secondary schools or prohibit DEI trainings for government employees.

 

There’s a story to be told about the impact of these laws, how these bans make it harder for universities and government agencies to build respectful campus and office communities that also look like the nation as a whole or how the vague language of curriculum bans leave many educators unsure of how to teach important parts of American history. But the point that Abrams is making is more elemental than all of that.

 

She’s making a powerful argument that attacks on DEI are attacks on fundamental American values and really attacks on the underlying values of a democracy itself. Defending democracy means defending DEI, and Abrams can help us understand how to do both. Stacey Abrams, welcome to The Context.

 

Stacey Abrams: Thank you for having me.

 

Alex Lovit: So in this conversation we’re mostly going to focus on the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but before we get there I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask your thoughts on this crazy election we’re all living through right now. Joe Biden withdrawing from the nomination so close to the election really unprecedented in American history. It looks like Kamala Harris is going to be the democratic nominee and the topic of diversity is relevant here.

 

So far 44 out of America’s 45 presidents have been white, all of them have been men, so if she wins Kamala’s portrait is going to stand out at the National Portrait Gallery. How do you think that Harris’s racial and gender identity will affect how Americans understand her candidacy and think about this election?

 

Stacey Abrams: We are a nation that prides itself on doing better, on making advancements, on righting past wrongs but also creating new opportunities. Vice President Harris is emblematic of that advance. We are a nation that for too many years had a very constrained notion of leadership. That leadership notion expanded with the election of President Barack Obama. It expanded again with the nomination of Sarah Palin and the nomination of Hillary Clinton and with the nomination of Kamala Harris.

 

And we have a chance again to expand that notion of what leadership not only looks like but what it means. Each time we bring new voices to the table, each time we expand our ambit of understanding what we create is a better country because more voices are heard, more experiences are validated, and better ideas come to the fore. And so I think that Vice President Harris both as a candidate, and hopefully as our next president on my end, my belief is that she is a proofpoint in the progress of our country.

 

And that progress means that everyone, regardless of where you begin, regardless of who you are, that you are included in the vision of the America that we all hold to be true.

 

Alex Lovit: Some Republicans opposing Harris’s race for the presidency have critiqued her because of her identity. Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett called her a DEI hire. Others in the Republican Party have argued against focusing on her identity. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said this doesn’t have anything to do with personalities, it should be about policy. This has nothing to do with race.

 

If racism and sexism are present in our society—and I believe they are—they’re inevitably going to have some effect on how at least some voters view Harris. Do you expect her identity to be an explicit part of the conversation about this election or do you expect it to be more relegated to internet forums and voter subconscious?

 

 

Stacey Abrams: I believe that identity matters. It is why J. D. Vance is touting his identity as a veteran. It is why Speaker Johnson touts his identity as a Southerner. Kamala Harris carries multiple identities that are reflective of the America we live in. And it is I think an insult to Americans for anyone to use diversity, equity, and inclusion as an epithet or a curse or as an attempt at insult. That’s rejecting the core of who America and who Americans say we are. We believe that you should have the right to participate.

 

Diversity means opportunity for all. Diversity is all people. Equity is a reference to the pathway to that opportunity, that no matter where you begin we should make it possible for anyone to achieve. And inclusion means that we expand the aperture of who gets to be at the table, who gets to make the decisions, who even gets to think about participation. And therefore diversity, equity, and inclusion are the loadstones of who we are as Americans.

 

Yes, what she may look like, where she comes from, will be part of the conversation but the same is true for every single candidate we have ever had for public office. What is discouraging to me is that they believe that it’s an insult for people who come from a background that is not their own should somehow be apologetic for their inclusion in this race and in this country’s leadership.

 

So I would argue that our responsibility is to understand for 248 years we have made it our mission as a nation to hold being American as an opportunity that includes all. We have passed laws, we have passed constitutional amendments, from the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the 19th Amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act. We continue to expand who gets full participation.

 

And anyone, any leader who would see that as a reason to disparage instead of a reason to celebrate I think fundamentally needs to reexamine what they believe it means to be American.

 

Alex Lovit: One last question on the current election. You’re a member of the Democratic Party. The Kettering Foundation is non-partisan so I’m not trying to elicit a sales pitch for the Democratic Party here, but it’s an institution that you know very well. You’ve spent your career working in it. And we’ve seen with Donald Trump taking over the Republican Party in the last few years, we’ve seen the impact that a new candidate can have on the party organization.

 

How do you think this change at the top of the Democratic ticket will affect the values, the policies that are being campaigned on? You know how much continuity and how much change should we expect here?

 

Stacey Abrams: Well, I was unequivocal and unabashed in my support of President Joe Biden. I am an unequivocal and unabashed in my support of Vice President Harris. What changes is not the mission or the values of the Democratic Party. What changes is how we engage and what we are talking about because for the last three and a half years the standard bearer has been President Biden. It will now be Vice President Harris. But they have been working together on so many of the issues that matter.

 

And more importantly they will continue whether President Biden is at the top of the ticket or as one of the legacies of our party we are going to continue to be the party of people, who believe that people should have the right to full participation, to full inclusion, to full opportunity. What has changed in this moment is the name on the ballot, not the mission of the party. And I believe that that is why we will be successful in November.

 

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. You’ve already touched on this, but you’ve argued earlier in this conversation, and in other conversations, that these values, diversity, equity, and inclusion, are really fundamental American values that our country has been striving toward throughout our history. How do you see DEI as part of the American story?

 

Stacey Abrams: So as I said, diversity means all people, people of different ability, different ages, different citizenship status, class, ethnicity, faith background. We have intentionally in this country over time expanded how we include these communities in the fullness of American life because we believe all people are equal. Whether it’s diversity or race or sexual orientation, all of these backgrounds simply speak to how different we are, so diversity means all people.

 

Equity is about fair access to opportunity. And that means that we have to understand that there have been historical and ongoing systems of inequality, that this is a corrective measure. We are trying to make ourselves better as a nation and we are trying to lay the foundation for each person to achieve their fullest potential which means that the communities and the neighborhoods and the families they’re a part of will thrive.

 

Inclusion fundamentally is about who gets to be a part of the American Dream. And the organizations that we’ve created that are focusing on this issue are really centered around that idea, that a person’s distinctiveness and their background and their experience and the way they think of the world is valuable. In the corporate sector it’s called talent management. You pick people who can give you a new way to think and therefore increase your innovation and how you do well.

 

And so we have to remember that as a nation we began with a fundamental notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We just did a very poor job of implementation. And so for 248 years we’ve been trying to correct the record. As I mentioned, it’s the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments. It’s the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 1964. It’s the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But it’s also Title 1. It was the law that said that public education could not simply be an aspiration for young people, it had to be made relevant and real.

 

And so let’s say you grew up in Appalachia, you probably benefitted from Title 1 schools. That was a DEI moment. It was a law designed to bring more people into full participation in education and therefore in the economy and in the operation of the world. And so I would argue that, just to go back to politics for a moment, vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance is a strong recipient of DEI legislation because Title 1 provided economic access for education for so many poor children.

 

 But we’re also talking about the Family Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Respect for Marriage Act. DEI is in America’s DNA. And when we let ourselves be siloed or treated as separate and divided because our differences are different, we allow those who revile those differences to pit us against one another instead of coming together, binding ourselves together under the banner of being proud Americans.

 

And if we are proud Americans we will stand up for one another and stand up for the diversity of our nation, for the equity of opportunity, and for inclusion in the American Dream.

 

Alex Lovit: So one reason I really love the story you’re telling there and the way you’re talking about American values is because it’s I think true but also inspiring. It’s something we can rally behind and that all Americans can take pride in, you know, despite the many sins of this country’s past. But that inspiring story has to compete against other narratives that attack particular groups, for example attacks on trans people, false arguments that immigrants are to blame for crime and economic problems. And democracy means that everyone’s vote counts, even people with openly bigoted views. So how can hope and inclusion win the argument against hate and division?

 

Stacey Abrams: So we have to remember that the pathways to the American Dream are fairly clear. It’s education, what you know. It’s the economy, what you do. And it’s elections, who is in charge, who sets the terms and the rules for how we engage. When we see those who have divergent opinions, or I would say sometimes vile opinions, about others, their right to those opinions are undergirded by DEI. So DEI is why it’s okay for those opinions to exist.

 

But the question is do we follow those opinions or do we hold to our values. One of the ways to hold to your values is to not allow your values to be demonized by those who are wrong. And one of the reasons for me the fight for DEI is so imperative at this moment is that we’ve allowed bullies, those who by their own admission despise diversity, revile equity, and dismiss inclusion, we are allowing them to set the terms of debate instead of holding to who we are.

 

The name of the organizational network that we’ve created is American Pride Rises because it is the pride of our nation that we correct our mistakes, that we expand who is allowed to participate, that we invite in differing opinions and that those opinions get to be heard. But just because you get to be heard doesn’t mean you get to win. So to your fundamental question, I do not diminish the legitimacy of every American to speak their minds.

 

But that does not give you the right to silence others, or worse to undercut and undermine the fundamental premise of this nation. True patriotism supports and defends DEI. True patriotism says that, yes, you have the right to speak but you do not have the right to strip me of my citizenship, of my place in this country.

 

Alex Lovit: There has been a lot of political discourse in this country about racial justice in the last few years and often, kind of weirdly often, this has taken place through attacks on three-letter acronyms.

 

Stacey Abrams: Yes.

 

Alex Lovit: So there have been attempts to delegitimize and demonize Black Lives Matter or BLM, Critical Race Theory or CRT, now Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DEI. How do you see the through line through these attacks and is there anything we can learn from previous experiences?

 

Stacey Abrams: So the opponents of DEI happen to have common cause with, if not identical identities, to those who have attacked ESG, CRT, pick your initialism. And part of it is that we use initials as an opportunity to let people come into space to give them a shorthand for what we believe. Patriotism is a complicated, complex, and very layered understanding but we use one work to describe it. It means something different to some people but we know what it is when we see it.

 

We often use initialisms and acronyms as a shorthand for deeper meaning. And what we know is that opponents of those opportunities, particularly around issues of race, begin by delegitimizing what we know to be true. They try to delegitimize and demonize our value systems. CRT refers to Critical Race Theory. It is an academic study of a bevy of laws that by our own knowledge existed in this country as recently as the 20th century, so just a few years ago.

 

And yet by being reductive and demonizing it, they were able to stop us from exploring what CRT actually referred to. They are trying to do the same with DEI because if you attack the initials you don’t have to confront the intention. And the intention of diversity, equity, and inclusion is to create pathways for others to fully participate in our country. It is a movement about defending America’s promise, promise of equality, of dignity, of prosperity, of happiness.

 

So we know that the opponents begin by delegitimizing and demonizing who we are and what we believe because often when you are mocked you go inward. It’s human behavior. Bullies started teaching us this in 3rd grade. They would pick on us, they would mock our names, they would pick some foible they thought about you and they would poke at it and they would make fun of it. And almost invariably the instinctive reaction is to validate the attack. We can’t do that. They’re not right. They are absolutely wrong.

 

So our first responsibility is to acknowledge that the tool of the bully is to demonize and to mock therefore the response has to be to legitimize and celebrate. The second phase of this infernal triangle, which is how I refer to it, is start by demonizing and delegitimizing, they then move to litigating. They sue. If you’re in school they go and tell the teacher and they go and tell the principal.

 

They try to make you the bad guy because they try to take the systems that should protect you and weaponize them against you. That’s the attempt that we are watching happen right now. The lawsuits that are being brought forward are not new. These are the same lawsuits that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Shelby v. Holder, because Shelby v. Holder was the case that undermined the Voting Rights Act, that gutted Section 5.

 

It permits states to once again engage in voter discrimination. Their intent is very clear, let’s litigate away all of those laws, all of those rules, all of those regulatory schemes that have been designed to protect and actually advance us and let’s regress. And then the third part of the infernal triangle, so you delegitimize, you litigate, and then you legislate. You go to the states and you say I’m going to make sure that we put in place rules and regulations that say they can’t come back and protect themselves again.

 

So if you think about voting rights, they began with Shelby v. Holder. Well, first they said there was no voter suppression, then they were able to gut Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and then they passed laws across more than 35 states to make it harder to participate in elections. With CRT they began by demonizing Critical Race Theory saying this is a terrible thing, lying about what it means.

 

They then got states to pass laws banning CRT, banning books, banning history, and then they passed state laws to make it impossible to restore knowledge. They’re going to try to do the same thing with DEI. And so our responsibility is to acknowledge that they have this infernal triangle that works and respond with what I would like to call the virtuous cycle, which is that we legitimize what we know, we inoculate ourselves by talking about it more broadly and more publicly, we litigate to fight back, and we legislate to protect.

 

We meet an infernal triangle with a virtuous cycle and that’s how we win.

 

Alex Lovit: Well, so let’s talk about the second two phases of the infernal triangle that you’re talking about, litigating and legislating. So I want to ask about the Harvard Supreme Court case from last year. This was the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard declaring that colleges and universities can’t consider race in admissions decisions.

 

And the argument why I’d make why that’s a bad decision is because it leaves us with a pretty weird system where universities can and do seek diversity through gender, geographic origin, economic background, all kinds of factors, you know the marching band needs a tuba player and the lacrosse team needs a goalie and every academic department needs students and teaching assistants. And so colleges are already considering all of these hundreds of factors.

 

And so another way to say that is that there is no objective standard of merit. It’s not that race is some kind of deviation from merit because that doesn’t exist. There’s no objective standard. But you’re smarter than I am and you’re a lawyer, which I am not. How would you explain what’s wrong with the Harvard decision?

 

Stacey Abrams: Well, you may not be a lawyer but you play one very well. That’s exactly it. There was a fairly facile and I would say arbitrary decision to dismiss race as one of the predicates for decision making but only in higher education, and not even in all higher education. Because let’s remember the same Supreme Court said that, no, you can’t do it in most universities unless it’s to the benefit of the country so you can still have it in military colleges. So there was not an absolute diminution of the right to do so.

 

There was a limit on who could benefit from it. And to your point other communities, other identities continue to be allowed benefit. It’s guised under this false notion that you’re reversing racism by not acknowledging race, which is infantile and asinine I would argue. It’s infantile because closing your eyes doesn’t make the world around you disappear. You just can’t see it anymore. And it’s asinine because it follows a logic that loses its thread when you pull at any part of it.

 

Allowing race to be used as a metric for decision making was designed as a corrective action because for the bulk of American history race was used to exclude. And so what was permitted was that race could be used to affirmatively include. That’s what affirmative action, taking action to affirmatively respond to past bad action. And one cannot say that 50 years of good action can erase 400 years of bad action. It’s bad math. It’s bad policy. It’s bad law.

 

But we also need to constrain what we believe Students for Fair Admissions actually accomplished. This did not eliminate DEI in America. It did not even eliminate DEI in education. It eliminated one facet of it. Unfortunately though there are universities and organizations and law makers who are taking advantage of this crack in the door and they are trying to pry it open and take it off the hinges to allow a bastion of racism to come flooding in.

 

There is no reason that Duke University had to dismantle a scholarship for Black students. There is nothing in Students for Fair Admission that made that necessary. It was an affirmative decision to regress. We know that the state of North Carolina, the state of Kansas, the state of Kentucky, that across this country states are taking actions that allow them to affirmatively discriminate again. We know that Texas and Georgia and Florida have all done this.

 

And the problem is that we are recreating the bad actions that we’ve spent the last 100 years trying to atone for and that’s because it was working. Because let’s get to the fundamental, DEI works. It has actually expanded who gets to participate. It has changed the complexion, the participation, the accessibility of America. And there are those who are very afraid that they now have to compete. And I think it’s a cowardly reaction. DEI requires more competition, more participation, and more access.

 

And those who oppose DEI seem to oppose competition. They seem to be very afraid of others getting to participate and they deeply, deeply, deeply disparage access. And we should hold them accountable for those behaviors whether they are Supreme Court justices, candidates for higher office, or CEOs of companies like Microsoft.

 

Alex Lovit: So something I’m hearing you say here, and I’ve heard you say other places, is basically that a lot of organizations might be overreacting to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, that that was actually a pretty limited ruling that was about only colleges and Universities, only admissions policies, and not even all colleges and universities.

 

So I want to ask, a lot of institutions in the last few years have developed DEI programs, offices, staff, what is the benefit to those organizations from doing that work and what does that work look like on the ground? And then how should they be reacting to the Harvard decision? You know how should they be acting in this kind of unsure legal environment?

 

Stacey Abrams: So first and foremost if you are looking at the corporate space, corporations make more money from DEI. They make money because what they do is they ensure more competition. They tend to make more money as compared to their competitive entities. We know it puts more money in the economy. It puts more money in their pockets. And it creates more consumers. So the value of DEI is that we make money, we do better as a society, as a nation certainly.

 

Companies in the top quartile of diversity outperform those who are in the fourth quartile by like 36 percent. So let’s put those in real numbers. If the four key racial gaps in wages, in education, in housing, in investment, if those closed we could have added $16 trillion to the American economy in the last 20 years. If we close the racial wealth gap, just closing that gap would increase the USGDP between 4 and 6 percent. That’s about $1.5 trillion.

 

We know that when we have more people participating we make more money. And it’s not just money being made by people of color, it’s money being made by America. It’s money that then goes into the needs and the intentions of our country. But if we have anti-DEI groups that want to stop the 0.39 percent of venture capital money that goes to businesses owned by women of color, that want to undercut the Minority Development Business Agency that ensures that minority-owned businesses finally get access to the investment they need.

 

What we are seeing is not an attempt at correction. We are seeing an attempt at depression. You are trying to stop people from succeeding not because they are stealing from anyone else. This is not about preference. This is about proactively increasing and expanding the economy. And so across the board all of the proofpoints signal that DEI works. So then you have to ask who would be opposed to it. Well, let’s look at John Deere.

 

They said that they weren’t going to sponsor social or cultural awareness events anymore because of Conservative backlash. So because they were acknowledging that they had customers who were different then they had 50 years ago they’ve now decided they’re not going to acknowledge it. Microsoft said that they were laying of their DEI team because true systems change somehow that it was no longer a business critical or smart as it was in 2020.

 

Well, in 2020 Black people were dying in a very public fashion. And so either you were being disingenuous then or you’re being deeply disparaging now to say that systems change isn’t important in this country. And then you’ve got the Society for Human Resources Management. They decided that they no longer believe in equity. Why would we celebrate organizations that affirmatively tell us they no longer believe in equity? DEI is good for the companies that are walking away. It’s good for Microsoft.

 

It’s good for John Deere. And for the Society of Human Resources Management, which should be championing these outcomes, it is deeply disturbing that they would instead walk away from equity as though it were a bad thing. We’ve got to listen to what companies are telling us about their value systems. And if they don’t value making more money, expanding opportunity, and strengthening our country we should look askance and we should ask why not.

 

The backlash that people are feeling is constrained. And this goes to the other part of your question. What Students for Fair Admission said, as you pointed out, it was a narrowly tailored decision around higher education admissions that didn’t apply to all higher education. People then point to Fearless Fund and the 11th Circuit. What the 11th Circuit did was they upheld an injunction against the distribution of a $20,000.00 grant while they considered the merits of the underlying case. So no decision has actually been made.

 

So we don’t have new law, which means we have to abide by the laws we have and by the society we have. And my deep concern is that what is being attacked is not an acronym, it’s not a corporate department, it’s not a grant, they’re attacking values. And when we get distracted by the bullying and the whining we are ignoring the attack on the core of who we are. That’s the problem. We have to stop being distracted by the prestidigitation and the way magicians work.

 

They make you focus on one thing while they do something else. They are trying to make us pay attention to these flurry of lawsuits that have not achieved anything while we ignore the fact that they are dismantling so many facets of how we’ve made this country work and prosper. They are going to cost us money. They are going to cost us progress. They are going to cost us lives. But we are getting distracted by headlines and not reading the fine print.

 

Alex Lovit: So just to do a quick footnote there, the Fearless Fund case you mentioned was a case about an organization that provides venture capital specifically for businesses led by women of color. And it’s right now under injunction as you said. But that’s not a final decision. It only is in one district. You know so I think the argument you’re making for not overreacting to the litigation is an important one. So let’s move on to the third of the infernal triangle, which is legislation.

 

We’re seeing attacks on DEI especially in state legislatures across the country, many anti-DEI bills passed, and that’s a complicated story because if we’re talking about state legislatures we’re talking about 50 different stories. And there’s not total coherence to what’s happening across the country. But a lot of them target universities. Can you walk us through kind of what are the major themes you’re seeing in this anti-DEI legislation and what are the most dangerous examples you are seeing?

 

Stacey Abrams: If we think about the architecture, you use litigation to remove the protective or expansive laws that have been put in place to correct for the remarkably narrow nation that we began with. And so we have seen laws put in place that expand the capacity of others to participate. And while race has been the primary focus of many of these lawsuits let’s not ignore the fact that there have been lawsuits that have now been lobbed against Title 9, which is about women.

 

There’s the Dobbs decision, which is about abortion rights. That was not a federal decision that eliminated access to abortion. It relegated abortion access to state decision making. Voting rights, that’s also DEI. That’s about who gets to participate in elections where racial discrimination was hereditary and historical. Gutting Section 5 did not say that the United States now believes in limiting who gets to vote.

 

It said we’ll let the states decide if they’re going to let you vote because we’re no longer going to force them and compel them to participate in a system that says if they’re going to discriminate they’ve got to get permission. Those are two incredibly important proof points because in both of those cases the litigation led to an elimination of federal protection, which meant that before no matter which state you lived in you had certain protections, after you were limited to the protections that the 50 states were individually going to allow you.

 

Which then gets us to legislation because what’s happening is that states’ rights are being used to justify limiting the value and the reach of citizenship. If you are a woman there are 20 states in this nation that will not allow you fundamental medical care. If you are a citizen permitted to vote you live in a number of states that have now taken advantage of the vitiation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act so that they can impose new limits on your right to vote.

 

Every single time we see federal legislation fall or federal litigation it is because they do not want the nation to be held accountable. They want individual states to now have permission to impose a limited value system and an aggressive discriminatory system on their targets. And so what Students for Fair Admissions, what happened was they said as a federal matter you can no longer use race. But what states heard is that we can now use that as a pretext for limiting what you can learn.

 

So we are going to dismantle DEI offices. In the state of Texas which has one of the largest populations of Latino student who are attending their universities, often first generation, it is now illegal to set up an office that attempts to help them integrate into and navigate what is often an overwhelming and complicated new world to be a part of. That’s what anti-DEI law says.

 

That if you are transgender or if you are in the LGBTQIA community at all it is now impermissible for there to be an office that helps you respond to the aggressive and known discrimination that may attack you because at the state level your state has decided you no longer are entitled to that protection. And so this triangle works because communities have been told that there is no problem. Then litigation says that if there was a problem the laws put in place shouldn’t help you anymore.

 

And now the legislation says, states, you have a free pass to be as discriminatory, as limited, and as harmful as you wish to be because we are no longer operating as a nation, we are operating as 50 different fiefdoms and you can value your citizens and your residents as you see fit.

 

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s touch on one more aspect of this which has been an important part of your career until this point, and is connected as you point out with DEI, which is voting rights. This is another case where it’s pretty complicated because it’s policies happening across 50 states, a wide range of policies that make it harder to vote, targeting in some cases particular demographic groups.

 

What are some the examples of ways that states are limiting access to the ballot and how is this not just an issue of democracy but an issue of racial justice?

 

Stacey Abrams: So in my book “Our Time Is Now” I go into a lot of detail. But let’s just think about the fundamentals. Voting rights come from the ability to register, to cast a ballot and have the ballot counted. So the corollary is that voter suppression questions whether you can register and stay on the rolls, can you cast a ballot, and does your ballot get counted.

 

We know that with the gutting of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby v. Holder decision, what Chief Justice John Roberts said was, well, we can no longer prove that states have any discriminatory intent and therefore we are no longer going to provide oversight unless, Congress, you decide that you agree, which essentially put us back the pre-Voting Rights Act of 1965 where the states that were the most aggressive and egregious participants in voter suppression said, no, you can’t monitor me.

 

And so we once again told the fox that not only could you guard the henhouse but you could tell us if the hens were being harmed or not, so we’re trusting the foxes to be good actors. So that’s the fundamental problem with Shelby v. Holder. When you think about what it means in today’s terms we no longer have the blanket discrimination that we had that preceded the creation of Section 5. What we have is a much more sophisticated model because you no longer need to block entire classes of people from voting.

 

Most elections in this country that are competitive are determined on the margins so you don’t have to get rid of everyone. You just have to get rid of a lot of them, or you have to limit their access. And so you begin with what is the first stage which is voter purging. You take people off the rolls or you don’t allow them on. So in states like Georgia we have seen voter purges where thousands of people are removed at a time not because they have done something wrong, but because they simply chose not to vote.

 

And Georgia is one state but there are several states that use this system. You also have the examples of Texas and Florida where even getting to register has been made more difficult, so much so that at a certain point the League of Women Voters declined to register voters in Florida because they were concerned about their ability to do so without it costing them thousands of dollars.

 

When you can scare the League of Women Voters, a non-partisan organization, out of their fundamental mission, you’re probably doing something wrong. Then you have the disenfranchisement of the 4 million incarcerated which in Florida again we saw a constitutional amendment adopted by the people of the state that immediately got abrogated by the governor and a very terrified state legislature that didn’t want new voices in the process. So that’s can you register and stay on the rolls.

 

Second is can you cast a ballot. Well, let’s take Texas or Arizona or states that have put constraints on voting by mail. For a lot of communities voting by mail is the only real way to cast your ballot because these are also states that have laws that say you can’t get paid if you have to take off time from work to go vote. You can vote but you can’t get paid for it, and they don’t protect your job if you do.

 

Or if you are disabled, this is one of the populations that is the most aggressively harmed by these rules because they have limited access. And we’ve seen state after state after state constrain who can actually cast a ballot. And so if you’re a young person who went away to college there are new rules in New Hampshire, across the country, trying to limit who can fully participate in our election. So can you cast a ballot is now under question.

 

And then the last is does that ballot get counted. Well, we have seen a number of lawsuits. And in this case—Now I would admit I’m a member of a party that for many years was the proudest leaders of voter suppression. They don’t do that anymore. Now it’s mostly the province of Republicans. So this is not partisan, this is just true. The RNC has been the most active entity suing to limit which ballots get counted.

 

When you mail in your ballot if you have no control over a post office that is delaying your mail as long as it got postmarked does your vote still get counted? Well, they’re suing to say no in multiple states. We have places like Georgia where we had to sue to force different counties within the state to count the ballots. And we were able to get some advance until the Supreme Court said, well, actually you would flexibility on that.

 

So certain votes count more than others, if they count at all. All of which is to say that the attack on voting rights is not an abstraction, it is an intention. If you go back to the three pathways to the American Dream—education, the economy, and elections—if you want to make certain that you can strip people of their rights and make certain those rights are never restored, taking their voting rights is the safest way to accomplish that.

 

It’s the most efficient way. And these days you don’t have to take everyone’s, you just have to take enough to diminish those margins until they’re invisible. And also diminish a person’s belief that it’s worth trying. Voter suppression isn’t just about stopping a vote, it’s about stopping a community from thinking it’s worth trying. And the psychic effect has the longest standing harm. And that’s why for me it’s so important that we talk about both.

 

Alex Lovit: So we’ve just talked about a large-scale attack on American values in the attempts to delegitimize DEI, attack DEI practices through litigation and legislation, and then the attack on voting rights, on this fundamental value of the United States which is democracy, the idea that we all get a say. So that’s a big problem. For listeners of this show that may be thinking, wow, that sounds like a problem, what can I do to help, what can they do to help?

 

Stacey Abrams: First of all, recognize that the reason we’re under attack is because we’re winning. You don’t attack a failed system. You don’t attack something that is inert, or worse, that is accomplishing your ends. And if the end that is sought is to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion then we are winning and they are losing. So we’ve got to enter this as gladiators. We’ve got to know we are on the ascendance.

 

And when you’re on the ascent you cannot then be distracted by those who would pretend that you are losing because, as I said, that is a tactic. It is not a truth. They are trying to distract us from what we know is actually working. And so I described the infernal triangle. Our job is to follow the virtuous cycle. One, we have to legitimize what we know.

 

That means we have to speak up, tell our stories, tell the truth, talk about the successes we’ve seen, talk about why it matters, and make certain that we go beyond the very narrow understanding of what DEI is to the broader reality that all of us benefit from DEI. It’s about innovation. It’s about creativity. It’s about problem solving. And we know that workplaces and schools and even economies are harmed when we don’t have DEI.

 

The second is that we have to inoculate. That means we don’t just talk to the people who already agree with us, we talk to everyone. We use our social media. Every time you see a derogatory hashtag you should respond with a positive one. But more importantly take the lead and put those positive hashtags into the ether. Tell the stories not just to your friends, but to anyone who follows you. And when you’re sitting in conversation and someone says something that’s disparaging, don’t let it go.

 

Don’t fight about it, just correct it. Say the right thing and make certain that your voice gets added to the chorus because someone is going to hear you and when they hear you they then believe that they can participate. Next we have to recognize that the litigation that is happening is only going to be successful if we remain silent. Look out, find out if you’re part of an organization, if you’re part of a community that can file an amicus brief that can talk about what’s happening and can share the impact.

 

And then lastly, when it comes to legislation I am incredibly excited about this presidential election. And I’m even more excited about the state and local elections that also have to be a part of this. One of the major tactical intentions of those who are pushing this infernal triangle is to devolve decisions to the states. Well, if that’s where the power is going we’ve got to be there to meet it. And so we cannot simply focus on the national and federal. We have to do that.

 

But we’ve got to concentrate our attention also on the state and local because that’s where this is won and lost. We can win if we speak up, if we stand firm, and if we stay in touch with one another and share what we are doing and share our victories and don’t get so distracted by the defeats.

 

Alex Lovit: Stacey Abrams, thank you for your relentless energy in defense of democracy and thank you for joining me on The Context.

 

Stacey Abrams: Thank you for having me. It has been fun.

 

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. If you listen to podcasts regularly, you’ll have heard basically every single host to ask you to rate and review their shows or to help promote them through word of mouth. The reason we all ask this of you is because these really are the most important ways that podcasts build their audiences. So why don’t you take a minute and head to Apple podcasts or wherever you listen and leave a review for your favorite show.

 

And if that isn’t The Context, well, hey, maybe leave us a positive rating too. I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the Foundation. Research assistance by Isabel Pergande. Episode production by George Drake, Jr. Kettering’s Director of Communications is Melinda Gilmore. You can learn more about the Kettering Foundation or subscribe to our newsletter on our website, Kettering.org.

 

If you have questions or comments about the show, drop us a note. Our email is TheContext@Kettering.org. We’ll be back in this feed in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. The views expressed during this program are critical to us having a productive dialog but they do not reflect the views or opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The Foundation’s broadcast and related promotional activities should not be construed as an endorsement of its content.

 

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Transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Kettering Foundation contractor and may contain small errors. The authoritative record is the audio recording.