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

by Stacey Abrams

In the early history of the United States, the political players pretty much looked alike. The moniker we use almost says it all: the Founding Fathers. If we add the modifier “white,” then the description would be accurate. To be fair, we have all heard the quiet role others played in the intellectual history of our fundamental documents, like Benjamin Banneker and Abigail Adams, but the principal architects were uniformly white men. The U.S. Constitution reveals this original identity as the one to be protected at all costs. Social movements anchored by identity began nearly as soon as the country did, between the abolitionists opposing slavery, women demanding suffrage and equality, and the poor of every race being exploited for their labor. The fight over slavery led inexorably to the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. Women’s suffrage became a multigenerational movement that culminated in the Equal Rights Amendment. Juxtaposed beside these fights over race and gender, Americans have long waged a political fight to use class as a centrifugal force, and, in several ways, class identity has had more success and a nearly parallel history.