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

by Stacey Abrams

Both she and my grandfather had been quieter in the movement because they understood the consequences if they got caught. Putting food on the table and keeping their house kept both of them primarily on the sidelines.

By undermining confidence in the system, modern-day suppression has swapped rabid dogs and cops with billy clubs for restrictive voter ID and tangled rules for participation. And those who are most vulnerable to suppression become the most susceptible to passing on that reluctance to others.

For those who cling to the days of monochromatic American identity, the sweep of change strikes a fundamental fear of not being a part of an America that is multicultural and multicolored. In their minds, the way of life that has sustained them faces an existential crisis, and the response has been vicious, calculated, and effective.

At its inception, our nation served as a refuge to those whose difference placed them in danger; but the same newcomers stole land from and murdered the original inhabitants, enslaved blacks and stripped them of their humanity, and denied basic rights to women and nonwhites from abroad.

This history means we understand what is at stake, how our opponents will try to block change, and, most important, our ...

But our belief in the resilience of our national narrative has been so complete that we’ve missed the Invisible Gorilla in our existing political system: those at risk of losing power—that powerful minority—have changed the rules of the game. Again.

But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion.

Add to that the generational underfunding of the basic mechanics of elections, where incompetence and malfeasance operate in tandem, and the sheer complexity of the national voting apparatus smooths suppression into a nearly seamless operation.

the threat is also coming from inside the coalition itself: citizens grappling with racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty are the least likely to vote. They have come to expect suppression from the opposition and inaction from the winners. Worse, the candidates who should engage them are afraid to reach out. We need active and relentless participation in our elections and government. Unfortunately, candidates and their consultants tend to view these groups as the hardest and most expensive to reach, so campaigns typically decide to hunt elsewhere for votes. Or political leaders fear that visible engagement with these marginalized groups will cost them votes from white traditional voters, and they deliberately ignore their communities.

We must dispel myths that give primacy to the archetype of a working-class white man in Ohio who voted for Reagan in 1980, and instead expand our polity to recognize that his daughter might be married to a Kenyan woman who is waiting for permanent residence and their first child in Arkansas.

To restore our country, we have to deconstruct what got us here and how to repair our nation before it’s too late.

The vast, invasive, and complex electoral system controls everything—from determining the quality of our drinking water to the lawfulness of abortion rights to the wages stolen from a domestic worker. The voting system is not just political; it is economic and social and educational.

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.

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.

This is one of the persistent problems of our ideal of democracy: grand, sweeping national laws or legal decisions announce a new way of behavior. Yet, our fifty separate states have little reason to fully adhere

What made the Voting Rights Act real, what forced desegregation, were the local political leaders who made it so. They were often normal men and women who saw modest progress as less harmful than obstinacy.

They believe that more than protest, a true activist must put people in office who share their values.

Though the Founding Fathers gave a nod to universal equality in the Declaration of Independence, they abandoned the aspiration by the time they penned the country’s organizing documents. Let me be clear here: the codification of racism and disenfranchisement is a feature of our lawmaking—not an oversight.

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.

The United States is one of the few democratized, industrialized nations that uses the piecemeal, inconsistent, state-by-state method of registration—and that puts the onus on the citizen to get on the rolls. With the management of elections left to individual states, the fractured, disjointed process is key to voter suppression. Where registration is easier, voters are more likely to participate.

and got the amendment placed on the ballot.

Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp strongly favored the “use it or lose it” power in Georgia, where he removed over 1.4 million voters in a state with 6 million registered users.