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

by Stacey Abrams

Voter suppression is not a new phenomenon, and, truth be told, it isn’t entirely partisan. Suppression began before the advent of political parties and became a favored tool of the party in power. Democratic-Republicans, Know-Nothings, Democrats, and Republicans have all leveraged the power of suppression to win elections and deny votes to the other side. The stripping away of rights comes through racial and sexist animus, incompetence, willful ignorance, and malfeasance. Sometimes, these occur all in the same action. Since our nation’s inception, the brokers of power have sought to aggregate authority to themselves. At first, that meant old white men who denied a political voice to their wives, their slaves, their indentured servants, and the native landholders. These white men—and they were all white men—relied upon women, slaves, servants, and Native Americans to build the commerce and physical structures of the colonies, and then all were conscripted in some fashion into the Revolutionary War. They wrote the Constitution with a grandiose and seductive ideal of freedom at its core, one that embedded hypocrisy in its three-fifths compromise for slavery and the omission of women altogether. But the appeal of freedom and the moments of courage and valor that have made up the American story means we still hold that aspiration today. But we sell the story to other nations without fully confronting the internal conflict our actions demonstrate to those who look to America as ...