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

by Stacey Abrams

We know the nation is rapidly diversifying, but the acceleration of demographic transformation is faster in certain areas, like the Sun Belt (the collection of Southern and Western states stringing from North Carolina across to Arizona). Still, changes are occurring nearly everywhere, affecting how electoral power is disbursed and what policies are expected in return. The power of democracy is concentrated in the right to vote, and voter suppression has been the most effective means of disrupting that ability. But who a person votes for matters as much as having the ability to cast a ballot. With candidates who reflect a range of experiences, outlooks, and, yes, identities, stepping up to be elected, voters have recently experienced an unprecedented array of choices. Now, from the most local to the highest federal offices, candidates are expected to reflect the mélange that is America. And voters believe they should be able to make a choice between more than two heterosexual...

“Identity politics” has become a hostile phrase for some and a rallying cry for others, though the concept is as old as our nation, just like voter suppression. As a result, our politics, particularly around elections, often resolves into a dichotomy about how to win elections. The argument goes that we must talk exclusively either about groups that are explicitly excluded or only about those who feel as though they’re going to be left out if the conversation changes. Presumably, we can’t talk about both. Yet, our democracy has always been grounded in how we must investigate identity and work to include everyone, at least in theory. The best democratic acts are the ones that can bring people together, not by pretending we all have the same issues but by recognizing the obstacles that some of us face and the opportunities that all of us want. To untangle the hysteria and fear surrounding identity politics, we have to understand where it came from, why so many fear it, and, most important, how to harness its power. To be clear, I believe we must embrace identity politics if we are to save our democracy and thrive. Both ardent opponents on the right and worried critics on the left tend to gloss over the history of who we are and how that experience shapes our engagement of public policy.

I have been asked about the potential balkanization of politics where embracing identity means that we can no longer reach consensus on broader issues. Though the question is well intentioned, I find it somewhat naive. Those of us with identities that have long been ignored or, worse, weaponized against us, have successfully managed to work together to elect politicians to represent us. Long before women were seen as viable executives, or people of color could afford to run for Congress in great numbers, we used our identity politics lens to identify those who would get us as close to progress as possible—voting in tandem with others of different backgrounds and challenges. The difference today is that identity is no longer a sidebar; for millions, their concerns may be front and center as they vet those who would speak for them. When leaders refused to see my family, my parents voted for those who would, and the best metric was someone who looked like us and had experiences like us. Then, as now, identity matters. I embrace identity politics because for the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the minority groups still grappling for purchase in our politics, identity is the strongest defense against invisibility.

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.

Supporters of class-based identity will conflate their goals with those of the populists, but the ideas are parallel, not identical. Populist movements alternately either avoided or derided the issues of minority status. Their persistence throughout American politics has allowed class to serve as an acceptable form of identity politics. By folding in the economic struggles of farmers, miners, and laborers, the earliest constructs of identity politics nimbly evaded confrontation with the intersections of other identities, like race, gender, and sexual orientation. However, as those issues gained more prominence in the twentieth century, political activism demanded a broader discussion of who would be heard in the American polity.

The labor movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries merged into both civil rights movements and feminist movements, but often the class struggle pitted itself against the rise of these groups as separate enemies to be fought. The economic class struggle increased rights for white men but still denied women and people of color the right to own property. Later, as the prohibitions against ownership fell, the restrictions were replaced by limits on access to capital or even the right to purchase property in certain areas of town. Likewise, as public education expanded to include primary, secondary, and postsecondary options, marginalized groups were either segregated or denied access to educational achievement. Even in the wake of World War II, the G.I. Bill excluded Blacks and other minority military men from benefiting from its educational investment. Across the board, economic class, as an identity, never fully included all the economically disadvantaged in its ranks. Instead, once class was established, new filters of race, immigration, gender, and sexual orientation weeded out those considered unworthy of its benefits.

Race has been a constant source of identity politics; and in each century, politicians and average citizens have battled over which races counted and who belonged at the seat of decision making. The first wave of identity politics and race questioned the humanity of Blacks and the treatment of Native Americans as the eighteenth century merged into the nineteenth. The Civil War, the Trail of Tears, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Mexican-American War had race at the center of the nation’s determination of who held value. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the brief humanity of Reconstruction quickly gave way to the Redemption period, when Congress traded away the future of Blacks for another century in order to resolve the election of 1876. In order to install President Rutherford B. Hayes, Republicans defending Black citizenship withdrew their protections in the Compromise of 1877. Then the laws referred to as Jim Crow allowed for gruesome lynchings, mob riots that burned out Black towns, and rigid segregation in education, in economics, and across all aspects of social life.

Native Americans suffered horrifically at the hands of federal leaders who vilified their identity as justification for the nation’s most brutal acts. President Andrew Jackson commanded the removal and effective genocide of thousands of Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Seminole via a 5,043-mile-long march over nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. President Martin Van Buren completed the “Indian Removal” campaign, and in the northern states, the Sauk, the Fox, and other native tribes faced war or removal.

Out in California, Chinese immigration hit a peak in the mid-1800s, particularly after the gold rush of 1849. Chinese laborers took on work in mines, on railroads, and along the waterfronts. They represented less than 0.2 percent of the nation’s population; yet, in response to demands for “racial purity” from white laborers and others, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act became the first federal law to prohibit an entire class of migrants. No Chinese person would be permitted to immigrate...

For Latinos who inhabited the American West, the Mexican-American War ended with a grant of citizenship to all who decided to stay in the United States, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. However, soon thereafter, the reality of a significant Mexican American population began to result in laws stripping them of the perquisites of citizenship. In Botiller v. Dominguez, the Supreme Court refused to recognize Mexican Americans’ titles to land in California. The decision came in the wake of the California Gold Rush, when the U.S. Supreme Court read federal law to strip Mexican American citizens of certain property rights in the 1800s. During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover oversaw the mass deportation of more than one million people of Mexican descent, an estimated 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens. Like Blacks in the South, the Latinos in the Wes...

By the mid-twentieth century, though, racial minorities had begun to assert both their increased presence and their capacity for organizing to combat injustice. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s led to a raft of new laws to address historical inequality. Likewise, the American Indian Movement, El Movimiento (the Chicano Movement), and court decisions to force language equity in schools and desegregation in housing benefited more and more people of color. Still, today, as...

Gender, like race, has been twisted into knots of both access and rejection. The movement for women’s suffrage succeeded, and the second wave of women’s rights seen in the Feminist Movement of the 1970s also yielded extraordinary change. Like people of color, women faced limitations on their very citizenship: the right to vote, to serve on juries, to work in the arena of their choosing, and the right to control reproductive choices. Through a series of movements, beginning with suffrage and continuing through first- and second-wave feminism, women built upon the compromises gained in earlier rounds. Yet, in each of these achievements, the intersection of race and gender left women of color behind, primarily Black women. Sojourner Truth voiced legitimate outrage in her “Ain’t I a Woman” tirade against a pale vision of suffrage, anticipating that the right to vote granted by the Nineteenth Amendment excluded Black women. Ida B. Wells faced rejection from wh...

The development of an identity politics for the LGBTQ+ community has stretched over nearly 150 years in America, from the 1870s forward. As the acronym demonstrates, no single profile adequately describes the range of issues faced by lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, queer, or other nonbinary individuals in the United States. Forced for most of American history into the shadows of daily life, the emergence of a social movement got its initial start during World War II, layering upon the underground freedom experienced in metropolitan areas like New York City in the 1920s. During World War II, the first iteration of “don’t ask, don’t tell” led to members of the LGBTQ+ community enlisting in the armed forces, and a relaxation of social constraints permitted more open behaviors. Backlash quickly followed, highlighted by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against homosexuals employed by the federal government in the 1950s. The public demand for equality for the LGBTQ+ community coincided and intersected with the rise of the civil rights movement. The Stonewall movement, which began with a raid of a gay club in 1969, launch...

Identity politics, a term originally used by Black women in the 1970s, became a shorthand for combining the two most critical facets of achieving full inclusion in the United States—who you are and how you gain power. Black feminists in the Combahee River Collective used the term to describe how difference had made them the targets of oppression. But, more optimistically, they recognized that using the common experiences of that identity could allow a new political organizing strategy to end that oppression. Over time, more and more groups recognized the resonance of the term, and they used their own common experiences to build coalitions, define the inherent challenges of their struggles, and leverage their new collectivism to press for change. Arguments continue over what constitutes true “identity politics” as a philosophical construct, a public policy imperative, or a flawed means of picking candidates based solely on external characteristics ra...

To own the power that voting provides, we must be positioned to select and elect leaders who will support our ambitions and clear barriers to our inclusion in opportunity. More important, we must acknowledge and accept that we all practice our own form of identity politics. Every person comes into the public discourse with histories and challenges. The worst political spaces are the ones where voters are told that everyone has the exact same narrative and everyone faces the exact same obstacles. The myth of the self-made man coexists with the stereotype of the welfare queen and the homeless junkie and the Spanish-speaking laborer. When political leaders homogenize our experiences or, worse, reduce them to insults or aberrations, they evade the hard work of understanding whom they represent. Identity politics forces those who ask for our support to do their jobs: To understand that the self-made man got zoned into a good school district and received a high-quality education, one that wouldn’t have existed if his zip code changed by a digit. To recognize that the woman on welfare with three kids is the product of divorce in a state where she risks losing food stamps if her low-wage job pays her too much. Or that the homeless junkie is an Iraq War veteran who was in the National Guard but lost his job due to multiple deployments and didn’t qualify for full VA care. And that the laborer is a migrant farmworker who overstayed his visa to care for his American-born children.

Single-strand identities do not exist in a household, let alone in a nation. When America is at its best, we acknowledge the complexity of our societies and the complicating reality of how we experience this country—and its obstacles. Yet we never lose sight of the fact that we all want the same thing. We want education. We want economic security. We want health care. Identity politics pushes leaders to understand that because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation/gender identity, and national origin, people confront obstacles that stem from these identities. Successful leaders who wish to engage the broadest coalition of voters have to demonstrate that they understand that the barriers are not uniform and, moreover, that they have plans to tackle these impediments. The greatest politicians display both of these capacities, and they never forget that the destination—regardless of identity—is the same: safety, security, and opportunity. The goals of social justice movements and the imprimatur of identity politics have a common objective: to create permanent, unassailable legal protections that guarantee no one can strip another of fundamental rights guaranteed by citizenship. Yet, as with the core issue of voting rights, without inviolate protections, no marginalized group is ever truly safe.

Demographic changes and broader public inclusion have hastened this latest wave of hostility in the past few years to people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and women. Antagonistic policies that penalize differences, like the Muslim ban, caged immigrant children, and forced pregnancy bills are clear examples of this vitriol. More subtle is the evisceration of protections like the social safety net through slashes to food stamps by the federal Department of Agriculture or the rescission of discrimination protections by the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. For Native Americans, the risks come from forays by the Trump administration into stripping federal lands of protections and weakened environmental controls that en...

Our power to shape the future centers around the ability to cement rights but, more important, to understand the intersections of identity that deny access and opportunity. Difference is real, and to acknowledge such does no harm to the American identity as a whole. The vibrance of our identity politics reaffirms the complexity of our nation and the underpinning of our founding. People fleeing religious persecution did so because they required a safe space where difference would be tolerated. Our progress as a nation has been yoked to ...

It’s no secret that political and economic power tend to be distributed unevenly in even the most democratized nations; however, the U.S. census ostensibly offers a cure to the problem. It’s designed to count everyone and let the data tell the story. A bad census count steals from the communities that are not included. Federal dollars are distributed based on the number of people affected, and if a neighborhood is undercounted, the residents will not receive the funds allocated to solve their problems. And if they cannot elect representatives to speak up for them, they are victimized again. Consider a low-income neighborhood with high birth rates and tragic rates of infant mortality. Decades ago, we decided to intervene by providing public health programs like Medicaid and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, otherwise known as WIC. Each state receives an allocation based on a formula derived from census information. In places where at-risk mothers and babies are left out of the census, the missing information means a decrease in the amount of money the area receives. I have served communities undercounted in the census. During my career, I worked in local government for the City of Atlanta, at the state level as a representative, and in the federal government in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Management and Budget. Because of those jobs, I possess a granular understanding of what an undercount can mean, like t...

The census is more than a statistical juggernaut; it is an organizing tool we can use to salvage democracy. As the fiscal impact of the census grinds at the lives of the undercounted, so too do the political realities that come from not having access to resources or the ability to elect leaders to secure them. A regional census director has repeatedly told the story of a community that had begged county leaders for a public park. With no public green space, kids played in the streets and in vacant lots. On a regular basis, neighbors reported near misses with oncoming cars and drug deals occurring on street corners where kids congregated. Outraged and desperate, community leaders organized themselves and put in a proposal for funding to convert one of the lots into a safe space for children to play, free from the dangers of the streets. But the county commission rejected the proposal despite pleas from their district’s commissioner. The staff explained the denial: in the last census, a majority of families in that district had not participated in the census, and that meant an undercount of the children in the neighborhood. The commissioner argued that anyone driving in the area could see the streets teeming with kids in need of recreational space. But, the staffer responded, those kids were not included in the last census, and she could only go by the numbers. The average American understands the basics of voting rights because elections are nearly annual occurrences with m...

Gerrymandering has come to refer to the drawing of legislative districts in shapes and configurations that give a party or a person an unfair advantage in elections. The practice, which runs counter to U.S. constitutional goals of fair representation, got its name from the machinations of some Massachusetts legislators, when in 1812, Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that drew district lines for the state. One hyper-partisan district in the Boston area took the shape of a salamander, and so the portmanteau of gerrymander was born, and with it came denunciations from the press of the time as well as the governor himself. In the past two hundred years, both major political parties have leveraged the drawing of congressional maps to privilege incumbents and their parties. However, in 2011, the issue of gerrymandering captured national attention. The 2010 elections flipped control of Congress to Republicans. Voters also awarded the GOP control of state legislatures and more than thirty governorships. In states like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, the Republican sweep gave the GOP unprecedented power to redraw political lines based on the outcome of the 2010 census. In most states, redistricting happens the same year that the census releases its data, usually in February of the year following the count. In state after state, the Republican Party not only cemented its 2010 electoral victories; it ensured little would change in the next decade and beyond by drawing political l...

Political scientist and statistician Dr. Simon Jackman explains the problem that is actually at the core of gerrymandering: that it creates wasted votes. “Wasted votes are votes for a party in excess of what the party needed to win a given district or votes cast for a party in districts that the party doesn’t win. Differences in wasted vote rates between political parties measure the extent of partisan gerrymandering.”12 Translation: gerrymandering intentionally runs up the number of people in a district who have no say in how they are governed.

I abhor the Electoral College, and I am not alone. Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination have called for its abolition.15 Editorials from the Washington Post and articles in the Atlantic decry its origins16 and its current purpose.17 The process is an antiquated, racist, and classist gerrymandering of the nation’s elections. Proposed as a compromise between the slaveholding South and the classist North, the Electoral College has long skewed elections away from active engagement of the nation. At the time of its conception in 1787, the North and South had roughly equal populations, but in the North, more of the nation’s inhabitants had the right to vote. Southern legislators wanted to count the bodies of slaves for political power but refused to recognize their humanity or grant them suffrage. In the North, leaders fretted about whether immigrants and the uneducated should have a voice in selecting the nation’s chief executive. Mimicking what had become the three-fifths compromise for the treatment of Blacks held as slaves, the Electoral College offered the South a version of what had been delivered for congressional seats: the benefit of a population count without the need to grant freedom to the enslaved.

By succumbing to the lure of populism made real by a combination of the Electoral College and voter suppression, we now have the most reckless foreign policy that we’ve had in modern history. I may have disagreed with George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush and Clinton and Obama on things, but I never disagreed fundamentally with the position the United States held in the international order. I do now. The persistence of Trump’s style of populism has an effect on how safe we are as Americans, both physically and economically. For example, during most of 2018 and 2019, the U.S. president launched the largest trade war in a generation. Though played out through goods and services rather than bullets, a trade war has a real effect on everyday lives. The U.S. consumer bears the majority of the costs passed along to businesses and hidden in the prices we pay. Economically struggling Americans feel the results in daily life, especially those who face stagnant wages that have not grown despite having the lowest unemployment we’ve ever had. The average American cannot recover from a trade war with the same resilience that a corporation can. The only solution will be to actually engage in trade policy that is not based on populist brinksmanship, which is what we’ve seen play out for the last few years. As Trump positions China front and center, our country is also embroiled in trade battles with historic allies such as Germany, Britain, France, and Canada. As with trade, our immigrati...