Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

The core value of the Voting Rights Act was to create equal access to the ballot, regardless of race, class, or partisanship. Yet, the Shelby decision and its aftermath deny the real and present danger posed by those who see voters of color as a threat to be neutralized rather than as fellow citizens to be engaged. Justice Taney refused to see Dred Scott as a citizen and, in the process, stripped him of his right to participate in the direction of his future and that of his progeny. Without a Voting Rights Act–style oversight, voters of color once again face the specter of being outside the protections of our Constitution. Without a protected right to vote, the Shelby decision and the proliferation of anti-voting laws have destabilized the whole of our democratic experiment. Rather than a Justice Department that prevents discriminatory voting policies from taking effect in the first place, the Supreme Court created a system of disproportionate impact, one in which justice could prevail in select instances and only after multiple federal courts intervened. To fight voter suppression, we must understand what things look like post-Shelby. Voter suppression no longer announces itself with a document clearly labeled LITERACY TEST or POLL TAX. Instead, the attacks on voting rights feel like user error—and that’s intentional. When the system fails us, we can rail and try to force change. But if the problem is individual, we are trained to hide our mistakes and ignore the concerns...