Stacey Abrams Moderator: Diane Brady, Fortune
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00:00Well, thank you, I've never gotten a cheer like that before, so thank you very much.
00:05They read your bio.
00:06You know what I love about your bio, and thank you so much for joining us, is when we were
00:10said, how would you like to be described, they said, she'd like to be described as author
00:14and activist.
00:15I thought that was very interesting, so is that how you think of yourself right now?
00:19I mean, of course, we've had the whole pantheon of what you're doing, but I know you've written
00:24a lot of books, but the activist part I'm interested in.
00:27So, when I was growing up, my mom, one day when I was about 14, she said, you don't want
00:32to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.
00:34What she meant was, Stacy, pick something, you're doing too much stuff.
00:37What I heard was try everything, which proves the importance of communication.
00:43But to your question, I see the path that I have, the work I'm trying to do, I know
00:50what my end goal is, but it's a freeway, and so my job is to pick the lane at the time
00:56that gets me where I need to be, and be able to shift lanes depending on the traffic, depending
01:01on the obstacles, and depending on the need.
01:04And so right now, my strongest utility is in the space of activism and authorship.
01:09Which lane are you in?
01:10Which lane is that?
01:11I'm in activism.
01:12I wanted to say, I was saying fast lane, but give me some sense of, you know, even that,
01:18the whole idea of public office versus public service, and I think you're obviously a force
01:24in the private sector as well.
01:27Tell me a little bit, how do you think about public office now?
01:29How are you doing?
01:30Because, you know, you get out, a lot of people, I ask them, would you ever run for office?
01:34They'd be like, no.
01:36And how, would you run for office again?
01:38Of course.
01:39But public service is the intention.
01:42Public office is a tool.
01:45And so for me, public service is always the responsibility.
01:50Sometimes you think you have the right tool, someone says, no, we don't like yours, so
01:53you don't get to use it that day.
01:55But that doesn't mean you decide, I'm never going to hammer again.
01:58You just figure out when it's the most appropriate tool.
02:01But it's also, I think, the tendency of us to conflate politics and policy.
02:07I believe in policy, and politics should be a tool for the policy you want.
02:12Unfortunately too often, policy is the tool for the politics people want.
02:16And so the reason I don't conflate the two is that I'm always very clear that politics
02:21is something I do.
02:23Policy is the reason I do it.
02:25Let me ask about all the work that you've done around voter suppression, getting people
02:31out.
02:32How do you think about Georgia right now?
02:34Even the fact I'm reading that an individual can now basically point to their neighbor
02:39and say, you know what?
02:40I don't think that person should vote.
02:42So give us a lay of the land.
02:44Georgia unfortunately continues to be a leading edge of voter suppression.
02:50And if you've heard me talk about this before, I'll say it very quickly.
02:52Voter suppression has three components.
02:54Can you register and stay on the rolls?
02:56Can you cast a ballot?
02:57And does that ballot get counted?
03:00We have become very fixated in the last four years on that last piece, but that has not
03:05diminished the intention of those who would like to silence voters who have used the issue
03:12of can you register and stay on the rolls?
03:13So the mass challenge is what you're speaking to.
03:16In 2021, Governor Brian Kemp signed into law an expansion of mass challenges, and then
03:22in 2023 expanded it further.
03:24And so you don't have to be a neighbor.
03:26You just have to know how to spell.
03:27You can challenge any person and you can challenge multiple people.
03:31And now counties, which used to be able to dismiss these, basically they knew it was
03:36a sham.
03:37They didn't want to spend the time because they had other things to do, like administer
03:41elections.
03:42They now have to parse through all of these challenges.
03:44And there have been more than 100,000 challenges in the state of Georgia just brought by people
03:50saying I don't think this person should be able to vote.
03:52That's a diminution of our democracy.
03:57Who you pick when you go into the ballot is partisan.
04:00The process should not be.
04:02And any time the ability to cast a ballot depends on who's in office, democracy is imperiled.
04:10And so in Georgia, unfortunately, we're still fighting.
04:14Not only can you register and stay on the rolls, we also have bad actors who are trying
04:18to make it hard to count the ballots, which is the state election board again.
04:24And it sounds innocuous.
04:25Oh, we're going to count the ballots.
04:26Sure.
04:27There are more than five and a half.
04:29So right now it's about five and a half million likely voters in November.
04:35They are saying that by precinct, three people have to count those pieces of paper.
04:42Do you know how long?
04:43You can count grains of sand a little faster.
04:46And so the problem is it's not the intention, it's the process.
04:50And the way the process is being designed, it will delay the counting of the ballots,
04:55therefore delaying the certification, which means that certain precincts will not be included
05:00in the final tally of the vote, which means it could invalidate Georgia's Electoral College
05:05participation, which could alter the outcome of the election.
05:09This is intended as an act of chaos, not an act of integrity.
05:14Let me ask you, but what are you, obviously the race is very close here.
05:19What are you seeing?
05:20And let's start with that.
05:22Do you have a sense that which way the election is going to go?
05:27Georgia's a purple state, and what that means is that you have to fight every election.
05:31We used to be blue for 130 years, then we were red for about 25 years, now we're purple.
05:37And what purple means is that sometimes Democrats win, sometimes Republicans win, but every
05:42time you have to fight.
05:43And that's really what differentiates a swing state or a battleground state from any other
05:47state.
05:48When you don't know the outcome waking up, you have to fight.
05:51And so we know it's going to be a close election.
05:53It's a toss-up.
05:54It's a question of who is doing the work to turn out voters.
05:58And on the nonpartisan side, those of us who are also trying to do the work of making sure
06:02that anyone who wants to cast a ballot, regardless of who they intend to vote for, has the ability
06:06to do so.
06:07You know, it's interesting.
06:08I think you just came from Vermont, so you've been going around the country.
06:10You were a storyteller.
06:11I said you are a prolific author, actually.
06:14Can I just start with, when do you write?
06:18Usually when somebody either wants a book or their money back.
06:20Ah, okay.
06:21What's your next book?
06:22Can you tell us your next book?
06:23Yes.
06:24So it's called Coded Justice.
06:25It's the trilogy.
06:26It's the third book in my Avery Keene series.
06:29And thank you.
06:30And it's about, it comes out next May, and it's about AI and healthcare and the fact
06:36that we have no rules.
06:37There you go.
06:38It sounds like a dystopian nonfiction book.
06:41I don't do dystopian.
06:43I do improbable but very possible, so you should be mildly frightened.
06:50I think that, we're going to call that the theme of our, but let's go to where we are
06:54today.
06:55You know, when you think about, you know, Biden really was supposed to be the bridge,
06:59you know, and tell me some sense of what is the story, how do we tell the story in a way
07:04that doesn't keep us so divided?
07:06What do you think when you go out, you're around the country, to your point, it's a
07:10nonpartisan effort that you're making.
07:13What is the story that isn't being told?
07:16Let's be clear.
07:17I am very partisan.
07:18You're totally partisan.
07:19That's what I'm saying in your effort.
07:20No, no, no, but that's an, the reason I say I'm very partisan is that there's, the process
07:24should be nonpartisan, but the fight to save our democracy should be bipartisan.
07:29That's an act of patriotism, and so the conversation I have is we may have different value systems.
07:34We may want different things, but we should have as a foundational, fundamental, uniting
07:40value the protection of our democracy, and if we are willing to give that value primacy,
07:46then we should all be voting a certain way.
07:49Everything else follows, but if we lose the foundational responsibility of preserving
07:55our democracy, nothing else happens, because then we have descended into autocracy and
07:59authoritarianism, and America is not immune.
08:03We have been on the cusp before, and we pulled ourselves back.
08:07We are on the cusp again, and we have to recognize it, but the other reality is part of the division
08:13is not just a question of who wants democracy or not, it's also a question of what country
08:18do we want, and this gets to the DEI question.
08:22The U.S. has been in a corrective action state since its inception.
08:26When we started, we got it really, really, we got it right on paper and really wrong
08:30in every other way, and so we spent 248 years in this active engagement of writing the record.
08:38We call that diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it's a movement that encapsulates so much.
08:43I know Elizabeth and Neil talked about it from the perspective and vantage point of
08:46race, but it's also the fact that it took until 1990 for persons with disabilities to
08:51get coverage, and because of the Chevron decision, the Loper decision that eliminated Chevron
08:59deference, the ADA is in jeopardy, because the ADA is actually written to be almost entirely
09:04determined by statute and by regulatory decision-making, meaning if you now have to take every single
09:11question to court, if you are a disabled person, the protections you enjoyed the day
09:16before that decision are now imperiled, and if we think it's not going to happen, look
09:20up the Robles versus Domino's Pizza case when Domino's Pizza said they didn't have to fix
09:25their website to allow the visually impaired to use it because it wasn't in the law.
09:29But private sector, whether it's climate, there is this instinct that the private sector
09:35may continue to do the right thing regardless of what's happening on the policy front.
09:40We have a room full of people here that, for example, corporations are less inclined
09:44to talk about what they're doing, but they say they're still doing it.
09:48How important is it to be talking about the issues that you're...
09:52It's absolutely critical because we take for granted that we have shared values, but what
09:57the last few years have shown us is that if we don't talk about those values, we can't
10:01believe that they are implicit and shared completely by others, and the reason I use
10:05the ADA as an example is that right now, all of our attention is focused on race as
10:10a proxy for DEI, but if you can destroy DEI through race, that implicates every other
10:18protected class.
10:19LGBTQ plus, women, Robbie Starbucks.
10:22Women.
10:23Title IX is in jeopardy.
10:25When you see these NCAA cases being brought, regardless of what you think about the outcome,
10:30they are attempting to weaken Title IX because if you can weaken one facet of Title IX, you
10:36can completely eliminate it.
10:37That's why the case against Fearless Fund used the 1866 Civil Rights Act because you
10:42take the very law you despise and try to invert it to justify destroying the entire infrastructure.
10:49I told you, I do improbable that's possible.
10:52That's what they're doing with DEI, only they're making it more possible every time, so coming
10:55back around to your question, when I think about this election and what we can do together
11:00is we have to talk about it.
11:02We have to talk about the implications beyond the discomfort of, well, I don't want to talk
11:07about race or I don't want to talk about gender.
11:10We should be talking about how do we protect each other.
11:13We should be talking about how do our stories unite us.
11:15We should be talking about the American dream, and there are three pathways to the American
11:19dream.
11:20Education, what you know, the economy, what you do, and elections, who's in charge.
11:26DEI has been absolutely essential in removing barriers to those three pathways to the American
11:32dream.
11:33The Voting Rights Act was a DEI law.
11:35The ADA is a DEI law.
11:37Title IX was a DEI law.
11:39Title I, which allowed, oh, I don't know, some kid growing up in the Appalachian Mountains
11:4330 years ago to go to a public school that was fully funded and who's now running for
11:47vice president, he's a beneficiary of DEI.
11:53We have to talk about it because people don't understand how they benefited from it.
11:59I want to ask, it sounds like a non-sequitur a little bit, but what is your mindset?
12:03Give me a sense of, I wanted to ask where you get the most joy, but I also don't want
12:08to diminish how are you just generally feeling right now about how things are going on?
12:12Are you hopeful?
12:13Less?
12:14Okay, so I don't do hope or optimism or pessimism.
12:20I describe myself as an ameliorist, which I know is an entirely made up word.
12:24An ameliorist.
12:25Ameliorist.
12:26Ameliorate.
12:27To ameliorate is to mitigate.
12:28Ameliorist is not in the dictionary yet.
12:29Sounds hopeful.
12:30No.
12:31I'm imposing it.
12:32No.
12:33So here's the thing.
12:34I'm determined.
12:35I don't do, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know what I can do.
12:41And so I focus on what are my actions.
12:44The way I put it is the glass is half full, but it's probably poisoned.
12:48So my job is to find the antidote.
12:51Don't drink anything at your table.
12:53Well, no, you can drink it.
12:54Just be prepared to do something about it if it isn't what you think.
12:57We spend so much time hoping that things will be the way they should be.
13:01I spend my time doing the things to make the world the way I think it should be.
13:04And that I think is what is so important about this room and rooms like this.
13:08There are very few rooms that are filled with people with the power to actually manifest
13:13what the outcome should be.
13:15And each of you has that ability.
13:17Through tweeting and retweeting and, or whatever we call X-ing now, through using social media,
13:22through conversation, through amplification of the best intentions of America.
13:28We should be celebrating foundational values like diversity, equity, and inclusion.
13:33We should not be afraid of them.
13:35We should be celebratory.
13:36We should be protecting them, and we should be expanding them.
13:39Because it makes more money.
13:41It makes us better people.
13:43It makes the country wealthier.
13:45It increases the likelihood of our collective success, and it increases the bottom line
13:50for every company that engages in it.
13:52So I believe that we celebrate it.
13:54We defend it.
13:55We expand it.
13:56And if we do the right thing and we vote, please God, vote, unless you're voting wrong,
14:00in which case stay home.
14:01No, I'm joking.
14:02I'm joking.
14:03I do not want people to stay home.
14:04I just want you to change your mind and do the right thing.
14:08But we've got to defend education, the economy, and our elections, and then we can get some
14:14more.
14:15One quick last point.
14:16Where do you get the most joy?
14:17Is there a word?
14:19I have nieces and nephews who are extraordinary people who I want to see live the best lives
14:24imaginable, and they have no filters, but they also have no limits to their imagination,
14:29and so my job is to make it possible.
14:31Great.
14:32Please join me in thanking Stacey Abrams, everybody.
14:33Well deserving of a standing ovation.