WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1130 - Stacey Abrams

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Stacey Abrams believes deeply that the problems facing America today - police brutality, racial discrimination, economic inequality, Covid-19, creeping authoritarianism - all require the same solution: Free and fair elections. As the only Black woman ever nominated for Governor by a major party, Stacey tells Marc how she maintains hope that obstacles can be overcome and change can be achieved. Stacey also talks about how her family traditions of faith and service shaped her political identity and how her interests in acting, physics and writing romance novels made her who she is. This episode is sponsored by HBO Max, Space Force on Netflix, and SimpliSafe. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that. An epic saga based on the global bestselling novel by James Clavel. To show your true heart is to risk your life when i die here you'll never leave japan alive fx's shogun a new original series streaming february 27th exclusively on disney plus 18 plus subscription required t's and c's apply all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what the fuckadelics what's happening i'm mark mar. This is my show. Is anybody, has anybody seen the light? I want to know.

Has anybody seen the light? God damn it, please. Please. I have to stay in the present, man. I really do. I guess that's the goal that most of us... Do you aspire to that do you i mean you know when people say be present or you know the here the now this is it what like right now right now right now right now everything's okay right now right now is it today i talked to um

Is it? Today I talked to Stacey Abrams. I talked to Stacey Abrams on Tuesday, Election Day. So when the shit was going down in Georgia, all that malfeasance, all that fucked upness, All that fucked upness, broken machines, intentional chaos reaped upon the voting public of Georgia by Governor Brian Kemp and his allies. And I'm not being political here. This is fact. So that was going on when I talked to Stacey. So that's what we're referring to at the beginning of the business of the talk and i'll get to that i should check in with you guys what day when did i talk to you last monday it's been a rough couple of days here

i think it all kind of settled in. The passing of my girlfriend, Lynn Shelton. The arc, this is week four, coming into the end of week four since she passed. A lot fewer people are checking in, which is normal. Kind of abruptly sort of dissipates. The people that I've been talking to every day, I talk to. I cry to. But the aloneness.

I don't know if I want to call it loneliness yet, but the aloneness, the reality of aloneness. I guess this is what happens in grief. I mean, loneliness is some kind of yearning. I just, I was two, we were one, now I am one. The weight of that kind of hit me. A couple nights ago, I'm just sitting there and I realize the loss just hits me, just like breaks me down, just opens me fucking up. You know, like she's gone. All of that we had.

Everything was sweet. Now it's gone. It's all gone. It's just like my life is a different life. Man, I fucking howled. I called my friend Steve. I seem to be doing. I think it's better.

To have someone to howl with or at. A witness. A receiver. Somebody holding the space. So you can do it. And then that night I put on Dave Cross special Slappy

me and Dave sort of started out together I've known Dave I don't know if I know him we're not part of each other's life there's so many people who I've come up with or I know from around. But, you know, I used to live in this weird old fucking house with Dave. And I really wanted him to be my friend.

And we were friends for a while in Boston. But we didn't stay part of each other's lives. I don't know how people do that. There's so few people that I have that have remained part of their their life but he represented a time in my life where i was crazy and tormented and angry but we were doing comedy and broke in boston playing softball i used to watch him get up there and just do his crazy shit he's very he's very defined, Dave. Cross is uniquely Cross. So I watched his most recent special. I just wanted some relief or something, but I found myself kind of getting nostalgic, the familiarity of just hearing a voice that I knew in my 20s. Made me feel better.

It wasn't a matter of the material or anything. It was just seeing that guy, Dave Cross, who, you know, used to sit on a couch in Somerville, Massachusetts, in a shitty apartment. And there's a few of us living there. And Dave would just do the crossword, and I would sleep on the couch. And if he spent the night at his girlfriend's house I could sleep in in that room but anyways just connecting the heart to the old days seemed to make me feel better

let's shift gears into what's happening. Stacey Abrams is the founder of Fair Fight Action. She's the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and the only black woman ever nominated for governor by a major party. She's been mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Her new book, which I've been reading,

is out now. It's called Our Time is Now, Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America. You know, this is addressing, you know, what is happening from this point of view, from the point of view of fixing the system, primarily enabling people to vote, getting people engaged, trying to. It's an interesting sort of solution in the civic process is really how democracy works. And, you know, we had to talk about this stuff. This wasn't the standard kind of WTF chat. A little bit, but it was like we were dealing with stuff. Now, before I talk to Stacey or share it with you, I want to share a clip of a past guest.

It was five years ago next week that president barack obama did this show um the the interview itself with uh president obama was two days after a racially motivated church shooting in charleston south carolina it was also less than a year removed from unrest over police brutality incidents in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. And the first part of what he said in this clip that I'm going to play for you got a lot of attention at the time, mostly because people only focused on a word he referenced. But the second part was just as important and has like a tremendous amount of resonance today particularly what he said about police reform let's listen this horrible thing happens wednesday and and you know you have uh you know these police actions in baltimore and ferguson i mean where you know coming from where

you came from right and and you know trying to define yourself in terms of uh the african-american community and in terms of uh racial relations where are we with that in terms of when you came in in your mind well first of all i i always tell young people in particular uh do not say that nothing's changed when it comes to race in America, unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s or 60s or 70s. It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours and that opportunities have opened up and that attitudes have changed.

That is a fact. What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, that casts a long shadow. And that's still part of our dna that's that's passed on uh we're not cured of it racism racism we are not cured of clearly and and and it's not just a matter of uh it not being polite to say nigger in public, that's not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don't overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior. And so what I tried to describe in the Selma speech that I gave commemorating the march there was, again, a notion that progress is real and we have to take hope from that progress.

But what is also real is that the march isn't over and the work is not yet completed. And then our job is to try in very concrete ways to figure out what more can we do. So let's take the example of police practices. Cops have a really tough job. And part of the reason cops have a tough job, particularly in big cities, is that there are communities that are poor, are systematically locked out of opportunity, that suffer from legacies of discrimination that have been built up over generations.

And we send cops in there basically to say, keep those folks from making too much trouble. But how do we fix what you just said? Right. Well, I'm going to get to that. So the point is, though, that we can break it out into these component parts and we can say, number one, there are specific ways that we can make police community relations better and police more accountable. Yeah. And so we put together a task force with police officers and young people, including some

of the folks who led the Ferguson marches. And surprisingly, they came up with a consensus of things that could be done that would make things better. All right, so let's implement those. Now, in the meantime, what are we doing to help those lowest income communities? We know that, for example, early childhood education works. works. That is one way to break the legacy of racism and poverty. If a three-year-old, four-year-old kid is in an environment of love and is getting a good meal and has a teacher that's trained in early childhood development and is hearing enough words and is being engaged enough,

they can get to where a middle class kid is pretty quickly. Is that happening? It is, but the problem is that it happens spotily, right? It happens in this community or this school district or this neighborhood or this outstanding principal is making something happen or this philanthropist has decided to do something. But what hasn't happened is us making a collective commitment to do it. So the point I'm making is that when you look at how to deal with racism, how to deal with issues of some of the police shootings that have been involved, I'm less interested in having an ideological conversation than I am looking at what has worked in the past and applying

it and scaling up. And applying it and scaling up. What is required is a sense on the part of all of us that what happens to those kids matters to me, even if I never meet them. Because my society is going to be better off. I'm going to feel better about the America I live in, and over time, I'm confident that my children and my grandchildren are going to live a better life if those kids also have opportunity. That's where we have to feel hopeful.

Rather than just say that nothing's changed, we have to say, wow, we've actually made significant progress over the last 50 years. If we made as much progress over the next 10 years as we have over the last 50, things would be better. And that's within our grasp. It's available to us. And this is where, again, you want to get to those decent, well-meaning Americans who would agree with that, but when it gets translated into politics, it gets all confused. And trying to bridge that gap between, I think, the good

impulses of the overwhelming majority of Americans and how our politics expresses itself continues to be the biggest challenge. God, don't you fucking miss that guy? I mean, I assume there are people that heard the interview at the time that said that doesn't go far enough. But think about how different things would be today if we proceeded along those lines for the past five years instead of going backwards. Think about that. And the reason I played it is because it ties directly

into the political philosophy of someone like Stacey Abrams, who believes change is possible, but also knows the work that needs to go into getting there. There's no quick fix, man. So, again, her new book is called Our Time Is Now, Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America. You can get it now where you get books. And this is me and Stacey Abrams coming right up. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category.

And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly.

This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Death is in our air. This year's most anticipated series, FX's Shogun, only on Disney+. We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that. An epic saga based on the global best-selling novel by James Clavel.

To show your true heart is to risk your life. When I die here, you'll never leave Japan alive. FX's Shogun. A new original series streaming February 27th, exclusively on Disney+. 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's apply. How's it going? Well, we have a little bit of a problem here in Georgia with the whole, you know, voting being right.

But other than that, things are okay. Yeah, I read about that this morning. I mean, what exactly is happening? Is it all intentional? It is incompetence plus malfeasance. So they know what to do, but they don't want to do it because doing it means the wrong people and their estimation get to vote and then the things they do know how to do they do it so poorly and slipshod that today we've had hours long lines across the state and they've got new

machines that no one knows how to operate correct so they so in some level, the trick was we got these great new machines. Good luck. We got these great new machines. We don't have enough technicians. We aren't going to give you the resources to make them work. And yes, go with God. Yeah. And so what is your, like you have people on the ground from Fair Fight at all the polling places? Not at all of them because we have 159 counties. And so you've got to assume in Atlanta, 25 to 30 polling places. Other counties have fewer or more. So we are trying to stock up wherever we can, but we've got a statewide voter protection hotline. So anyone who's seeing problems can call us. And so we've been running interference all day. I got my first text at 718 from a former executive at IBM because she was at a polling place where the machine didn't work.

And so they all had to get paper ballots. Oh my God. And were you anticipating something? Yes. We knew this was going to be terrible. And that's one of the reasons we've been pushing so hard on absentee balloting and vote by mail, but they even managed to both do a good thing by telling people they could do it and then completely under-resourcing the process. I, in fact, had an absentee ballot that I could not submit because my envelope was sealed shut. And when

I requested another envelope, it never showed up. So I had to go and stand in line this morning to go and vote. They have people micromanaging these suppression efforts at the level of envelopes. I would say, and that goes to the incompetence. So they use a third party vendor out of Arizona. So if you have a problem, you can't just pick up the phone and call and say, I need something more. You've got to call someone who calls someone who calls Arizona to see if they can do what they need to do, but they were already behind because no one expected the volume of requests. And so that's why this is, it's so infuriating because it is, these are people with poor intention, but they also have incredibly poor management. I don't know how, because I was thinking about it from my own life and in terms of how you approach activism or how to make democracy work on this level. I don't I don't first I don't know how you maintain hope in the face of what what you went through with Brian Kemp and the and the governor election and and your choice to not concede, which was beautiful.

But I mean, when you know for years that this is happening since the beginning of the republic, I mean, how and you still sort of kind of push along and believe that it's possible that we can turn things around. I mean, like with a day like today. I mean, how do you how do you keep the faith? Number one, because my great, great, great grandparents were slaves and I got to be the first black woman to stand for governor in the history of the United States. So that's one. And so that means progress exists number two i'm i'm a woman of faith who believes the scripture that says faith without works is dead so i don't get to have faith if i'm not willing to do the effort part of it yeah but it's also because i know what can happen when it works because we've seen it it's not as though there though there's this mythological reality out there that I have

no concept of. I've actually seen it work in other places. There are states like Oregon, which no one would normally consider nirvana, but if you want to vote, it works there. And it works in neighborhoods in Georgia. It just doesn't work for the people who need it to work the most. And the problem is my job isn't to move to Oregon. It's to bring Nirvana here. Yeah. Because I find that even as somebody who is a progressive person, that when it comes down to state elections and stuff, I generally will defer to somebody I know who knows more than me and say, who do I vote for? I mean, I always vote, but I don't always know what people do or how it affects my life, but that's not bad, right? No, it's not. In fact, that's how most people make their choices.

We decide based on our own knowledge, but then we seek out other people's advice. It's why every talk show host in America has a show because we seek information from others who we think might know something more or get us access to something more. The issue is making sure that the information is good and making sure people believe they have the right to ask the questions. found when we started that when I started the New Georgia Project, which was our voter registration effort that I launched in 2014, we found that people didn't vote, especially the lowest propensity voters, those who are the most afraid of voting, because they were afraid of making a mistake, because they didn't have anyone they could call. They didn't have a progressive friend who knew more about the judges on the ballot. They didn't have someone or know how to get the information they needed.

And so instead of, they were so afraid of making mistakes, they just didn't participate. Because if you didn't participate, you didn't screw up. Or they were over, they may have been overwhelmed. Exactly.

Right. And so it's a matter of educating those people. Exactly. And it's about, so we're going to think of another state that's doing great work. Washington State sends out a compendium of all the things that are on the ballot, gives you information about every single access to that kind of information because it's all communally based.

And then you get to the polling place, assuming you can get inside or assuming your absentee ballot shows up, neither of which is guaranteed. Then you have to try to guess your way through. And if you stood in line for eight hours or seven hours or four hours, your willingness to ponder diminishes dramatically. The sad thing is, and it's horrendous, and I don't know that I think about it enough, is how much of this is totally intentional. That disenfranchisement is totally intentional. And that alongside with the police brutality protests and institutional racism in general, that disenfranchisement is totally intentional and that like alongside of with you know with

the police brutality protests and and institutional racism in general that this is all part of it that this you know the voter disenfranchisement police brutality you know uh you know jail slavery is all part of the same momentum that was you know put on the books at the beginning of the country. The system works exactly the way it was designed to work. The system at its inception granted the right to vote to white men who own land. It denied the right to vote to women. It denied the humanity of blacks. It denied the existence of Native Americans. And we had successive laws that essentially said, if you are Latino or Asian American, we don't want you either. We want your land, we want your labor, but we don't want you. And then the 13th Amendment ended slavery,

except if you were incarcerated. And then the reconstruction laws and the subsequent laws said that you could be arrested for anything. If you were said that you could be arrested for anything. If you were black, you could be arrested for standing on a street corner waiting for your wife. And the minute you were arrested, you were once again subject to jail slavery. The system does the things that was designed. And the challenge is the people who are now part of the system are demanding something new. And I think that's been the challenge for the last 240 years. For 240 years, the people who designed the system and who benefited from the existence of the system have been unwilling to make more than just modest

changes to it. And the inflection point we're in right now, the reason we're seeing police brutality take center stage is a conversation. The reason we're having a conversation about criminal justice reform, the reason we're talking about these systemic inequities is that they have always been baked into the system as a way to support the superstructure, but now the victims are demanding their rights because there are enough of us to demand action and to reconstruct the system. But the other pieces that we have to remember is the system is people. We elect people to make these decisions. We disembody their responsibility by calling it a system. But everything that happens, happens because someone decided it should or someone decided they didn't need to do anything about what was broken.

And so if we want something new, we have to do it. And voting is the way to do that, which is why voter suppression has been baked into this all along, because the very people who are the victims of voter suppression are the people who would have the incentive to change the structure itself. And if it was righteous and if the country worked properly, it would all work like Washington state. It would be that easy. For voting, absolutely. Yeah. And that seems like a fundamental right that everyone should have and we should all be informed and it should not be a challenge. Exactly. I mean, and it's thinking about all of, part of the reason I wrote the book was that we think about these things in isolation.

We think about them in silos. We think that it's just happenstance that if you live in the South, you have these high rates of incarceration and you have people who are permanently disenfranchised if they're incarcerated. No, it was part of the idea. Arrest them, incarcerate them, and when they get out, they still can't rejoin the community. And so you permanently disempower them. We have to start understanding what the pieces are, but we also have to understand how the pieces work together. That this is, I mean, to the extent it is a system, it's an intricate system where pieces fit together. And when you can make them all work really well, really rich people get wealthier, really powerful people stay powerful. And those who get ground up by the system continue to feed in and get ground up by the system. I think it's like there are people that who are I don't it's not a matter of there's a type of progressive disposition

that that demands change to happen immediately. And they are not comfortable with incremental change. And and they they're a lot of their point of view is based on maintaining a certain mentality of aggravated grievance. And and they will not they will not relent. And they will. And they, I think, are can become somewhat detrimental to the progressive process. If their urgency and their aggravated grievance convince them that if they can't have what

they want, they're not going to help. Right. That's problematic. Right. I don't mind their, I don't mind. In fact, we, we should celebrate those who call out the problems, those who are willing to challenge the norm and those who are willing to declare what should be. But if you don't get your way, if you don't get what you want, that's a tantrum. And that's not helpful to anyone, especially to those who remain mired in this or, more importantly, oppressed by these changes. I want more. I have

a vision of the best, but I don't have the luxury of saying, I don't want anything if I can't have everything. Because my life, my siblings' lives, my nieces and nephews' lives, my parents' lives are detrimentally affected if what I do is exempt myself from the process if I don't get what I want. And I just like in reading the book and then and also in seeing what's happening now, that it becomes like outside of seeking justice and demanding the criminal justice system to work in relation to these murderous cops, that ultimately all the answers to making the system work correctly, you know, come down to what you're promoting, that it really comes down to voting and it's not going to be an overnight process.

And in order for it to work, there needs to be a level of education and access that has to be created that could be take who knows how long it will take. But that is the way it works to keep people in a culture that are either compromised by poverty or just basic, you know, distraction to sort of, you know, keep moving in the direction that that will make your system function and work. That that's the real challenge, right? It is. And part of this is we are used to this notion of instant change because that's what we see on television. By the end of the hour, the culprit is caught. The problems are fixed unless you're watching a melodrama, in which case the goal is

the melodrama. But we get trained to believe it can work that way even more because we see that for some, it does work that way. My responsibility in the space where I enter is that we have to be honest with people because politicians feed in to that narrative. They declare that if you elect me, I will do these 10 things. Knowing good and well, they can't do nine of them. And they might get a bill on one that may go into committee. But that's the way the system works. And so my approach is, I'm not going to promise you a fix. I'm going to promise you an effort and tell you what I need you to do to make the fix more likely. Because the extent to which our elected representatives at any level of government aren't held accountable after the vote,

then the vote has diminished power. And so my approach is to say, number one, this is complex. This is tedious. It is unlikely to work. I mean, I used to get into trouble when I was minority leader, because I would tell, you know, I would make this joke, you know, minority leader means it's Latin for lose. Well, like I wasn't going to get the things I wanted. And my job was mostly to stop stupid or at least slow it down. And if I told you I was going to fix everything, knowing that I only had 60 votes out of 180, either I couldn't do math or I was lying to you. And so our responsibility is to make sure people understand the complexity of the system, that a President Obama cannot deliver legislative change if we don't vote in a 2010 election that then turns the Congress into a conservative frat house, that we cannot have the Supreme Court that we need if we do not hold the Senate in 2016. We have all of these pieces that we pretend operate in isolation, but we also

pretend that by the end of the episode, the answer is there. And that's just not how government works. It's not how politics works. It's not how life works. But we have the responsibility as elected leaders or those who would like to be elected to actually explain it and to make sure that we diminish the amount of power people think we hold by explaining to them that their power is greater than ours, because the way they can motivate us to get it done is to either hire us or fire us. And that happens by voting.

I mean, you used the word earlier. People are overwhelmed by what happens. And the more oppressive the system, the more realistic it seems that this is going to continue to exist. People can believe that you can eliminate a small scratch, but a gash, a wound, they believe less that you can actually solve that problem. And so that problem festers. And so I think it's the baseline issue of not knowing how things work, but it's also the imagination that it can be better. And that's part of the effectiveness of oppression. It's the effectiveness of voter suppression.

It's the effectiveness of a criminal justice system that locks up so many people. It is this constancy of behavior that makes you believe this is all there is. Can't get better. And that there's no use in fighting that yeah and then you have that type of state which is sort of what we live in for most people yes the thing that's frightening me now more than than a lot of things is is even fairly intelligent people's uh inability to see themselves as part of a bigger community, as part of a citizenship, as part of that. There's a selfishness and a self-centeredness now that's encouraged and seemingly malignant in that, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic, but a lot of people have just decided that it doesn't exist anymore.

And I don't know what what what that says about Americans. But like I literally they're they're just they they're trying to will it away. And that is a type of delusional behavior and lack of respect for the sort of general well-being of the populace that I don't quite understand. Do you? I understand it. I don't like it. I mean, we've always had these people in our society. In fact, one of them currently serves as the head of our country. And the extent to which delusion is reinforced by others who have the shared delusion, your sense of invincibility becomes stronger. But more importantly, to your underlying point, your sense of communal obligation gets eroded. And in a nation where so many pockets of our

population, so many segments are actually diminished in word and in deed, we shouldn't be surprised that people will suddenly think, well, they're really not valuable. We use these terms to disconnect and dehumanize. And then we're surprised by people being disconnected and treating people with lack of humanity. And so it's what we've built in part because we've had leaders, particularly in the last four years, but I would say over the last 40 years that have done their level best to diminish our faith. I mean, one thing I wrote an afterword for our time is now, and I talk about the fact that for 40 years, we have heard Republicans say that bureaucrats are useless and that we should shrink government small enough to drown it in a

bathtub. They've incarcerated and they've used language to separate us and divide us, but also to diminish our faith in science. We no longer trust the very thing that will save our lives. We cannot then be surprised that in the midst of a pandemic, the people who've been told for 40 years that government can't help, that science isn't real, and that it's somebody else's fault, that they don't trust science, they don't trust government, and they don't think they have any responsibility to others. And in terms of where we're at now, which is scary, and it's hard to really determine what happens next on any given day. But I mean, I can understand that there are reasons to be hopeful and there is things going on.

People are waking up and people are fighting for the good fight. But is there any part of your brain that fears authoritarianism in a real way? Oh, absolutely. that fears authoritarianism in a real way? Oh, absolutely. We are living in the early stages of an authoritarian regime. And it begins with a populist, usually, who uses coarse language and grandiosity to attract attention and distract from their lack of moral core. It then gets

transmuted into the domination of a certain form of communication so that they can discredit every other communication that doesn't reinforce their message. You then see them take over institutions or if they can't take them over like the judiciary, they then actually try to diminish faith in the other organizations like the media, like inspectors general. And then their end game is to stop the elections. And they stop the elections, not by declaring authoritarian rule. If you look like, if you look at Erdogan in Turkey, if you look at Indira Modi in India, if you look at Jair Bolsonaro, these are all authoritarian populists who are in various stages of this. But if you want to look at who's gotten it all done, look at Viktor Orban in Hungary,

who has essentially now become the strongman who's taken over what used to be a thriving democracy. And what Trump has done is every stage of the populist playbook, his only remaining stage is to discredit our elections, either by denying people the right to vote, which is what he's doing by saying that we shouldn't be able to have mail-in ballots, even though he and his entourage use them. In fact, may have fraudulently used them. But they also then say it's fraudulent if anyone else tries to use it. Oh, and let's dismantle the U.S. Postal Service. So just in case the fraud accusation doesn't work, we take the money away.

So we are in the endgame of early stage authoritarianism that's being suborned by the U.S. Senate, because the other thing a populist, an authoritarian populist does is they convince their political adjutants that their only survival is to forget who they are and join in this diminution of who we are as a nation. Be a loyalist over being a representative. Exactly. Well, that's terrifying. Yeah. But the thing is, and the reason for the overly hopeful title is that we can still fix it.

Yeah. I mean, democracy is fragile. fix it. I mean, democracy is fragile, but it can also be resilient if the people within it remember who they are. We had a civil war that was fought over whether Blacks were humans, and that ripped us apart because not everyone fighting agreed. Not even the people fighting for Black humanity actually believed it to be so, but they believed in the ideal of the democracy enough that they were willing to suspend their disbelief. And even if the outcome was good, you know, they were willing to do it. Of course you had redemption, which came after reconstruction when they were like, it was nevermind. But even in that moment, in that fraught moment, we were willing to, we had a fragile democracy that was torn asunder, but we had folks willing to fight to

build it back. And even though it was built back on shaky ground, it was built back firmer than it had been before that war. Now, I have to assume that when you were growing up, this was not the plan. Oh, no. Like, I mean, how many kids in your family? I'm the second of six children. Where'd you grow up? So I was, I was born in Wisconsin, but my, we all grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi. Okay.

So big family, Gulfport, Mississippi, your folks, what did your folks do? My mom was a college librarian who made less money sometimes than the janitor who cleaned the college. Right. And my dad was a college librarian who made less money sometimes than the janitor who cleaned the college. Right. And my dad was a shipyard worker. He was dyslexic. And so after college, he just couldn't get an office job. And so he ended up working as a dock worker and a shipyard worker.

And that's what they did their whole life? So they did that until the age of 40. Yeah. They were both called into the ministry and became United Methodist ministers. So we moved to Georgia when I was 15. They were both called into the ministry and became United Methodist ministers. So we moved to Georgia when I was 15. They were 40. And they went to Emory University to get their Master's of Divinity so they could go into deep debt to become really poor Mississippi ministers. So they finished seminary and moved back to Mississippi.

But they were both, you know, obviously people of faith. And when you say they got the calling, was that, how does that, how did that manifest? So my dad had been ordained as a Baptist pastor or preacher when he was in his early twenties, but he hadn't, he didn't preach. I mean, he would, the Baptist church is less organized than, or less regimented than, uh, did he get into it as sort of a uh like a business endeavor no no and that's the thing like my dad he was he preached his faith my dad was like one of those young evangelists who really wanted to talk about what god did and he was involved in civil rights movement as a teenager and for him between poverty and civil rights. Those were usually where his

messages came together. My mom was called later in life, but we had grown up in the Baptist church, which said that women, at least the strain of Baptist we were, the missionary Baptist church did not ordain women and women were not supposed to be involved in that part of the church. My parents, particularly my mother, did not find this to be a suitable frame for our understanding of our faith. And so we became United Methodist. And even then she was shy about accepting her spiritual call, but eventually she did. And that's when they went to grad school. And then they both had congregations. They were both practicing in different churches. Yeah. They finished in Georgia in 92. They waited a year. So one of my younger sisters, she's a couple of years behind me in school. They let her finish high school on, I think

she graduated on Saturday. They moved back to Mississippi on Monday. They wanted to get out of Georgia. So they moved back to Mississippi. My dad had a church, had a two church charge. My mom had three churches in rural Mississippi. And eventually my mom became the first woman to consolidate churches in the state of Mississippi and built a consolidated church. It's actually this big pink church on the side of the highway that was a community center. It was a gathering space. And my dad ran the outreach ministry in my mom's church. So you grew up in the church. I grew up in the church. But more than that, my parents really raised us to believe that if you saw a problem, you were supposed to fix it. So we were, my mom would call us the genteel poor. Yeah.

We had no money, but we watched PBS and we read books. And my parents would take us to volunteer regularly. And we would look askance. We're like, you do realize we're poor too. And their response was, it doesn't matter. No matter how little we have, there's somebody with less, your job is to serve that person. And so we really grew up with this both faith tradition, but also a service tradition that said, you don't let other people suffer if you can help. You don't let other people have lack if you can give. Your job is to be in community. Your faith, and particularly when we became Methodist, the organization of our faith said that you live your faith by doing good, but we'd been raised that way. Plus my parents also raised us, they would take us with them when they would

go to vote. And so we grew up with this very strong triumvirate of sort of this faith narrative, a service narrative, but also a democracy narrative. Government didn't do what it was supposed to for us and didn't do what it was supposed to for us and didn't do what it was supposed to for our community. But that did not exempt us of the responsibility of trying to hold it accountable. Yeah. I mean, you talk about that in the book a bit about how these promises were made or laws were passed and that because of the way the federal system works, that they, you know, they weren't necessarily enforceable on a state level. So there was a lot of waiting and ineffectiveness and things that were promised didn't happen. But your parents, you know, had,

I guess it's a sort of not, not just faith, but that they, they needed to be part of the system because that was their responsibility. Absolutely. My parents had a critical understanding of life. They'd grown up in various degrees of poverty. They had grown up under Jim Crow, but they also both had experienced and seen what could be if the systems work the way they should. And separately and together, their ethos said they had an obligation to try to make that manifest. And they raised us with the same idea. And what, well, that, that was sort of the backdrop of faith, service, civic responsibility, but what did you want to do with your life early on? I didn't know. I actually went through, I cycled through many ideas. I was, my first year in college, I majored in physics and philosophy, and I minored in

theater, and I was the star of the spring play. Yeah, what play? Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World by Suzanne Laurie Parks. Did you like acting? Oh, I love acting. I went to performing arts high school in my last years of high school. Oh, yeah? So that was part of the dream.

It was until I realized I did not want to do what it took to be an actress long-term because I loved acting, but not enough to make that my life. I loved physics, but not enough to study differential calculus. I'm like, I can watch Star Trek and I'll read, you know, Carl Sagan. I'll be okay. Yeah, that's enough. Yeah, it feeds me. I read Alan Lightman and I get my I get my fix. And philosophy, you kind of live philosophy when you do the work in politics anyways. What was it sort of was there a defining moment where you knew you had what did you get a a political calling so in the in 1992 when the rodney king decision came down i helped lead protests in atlanta uh-huh but i also got into

an argument with the mayor of atlanta and told him he was not doing enough uh in his role to help poor young people and i i used to go to city council meetings, not because I wanted to be in politics, but I was raised to understand if you wanted to know how people spent your money, show up. So I went to city council meetings. In college, when you were in college? Yeah. I was the most boring freshman in college you can imagine. I went to zoning meetings and zoning, I went to zoning hearings and I sat in city council meetings because I wanted to understand it.

Yeah. You wanted to understand government. I wanted to understand government. I didn't want to be in it. I just wanted to know why they were so bad at what they did. And so I got into a fight with Maynard Jackson, who was the mayor of Atlanta. Yeah. And the few months later, he gave me a job, but I still didn't think I wanted to do this for a living. However, as I mentioned, I had multiple majors. The Dean of the college made me write a paper about what I wanted to know when I left, because she was determined I would leave and that I had to have a degree to get out. And she's like, you can't keep majoring in things. So there was actually a little note in the registrar's office saying I was not allowed to declare another major.

So you had to go get this form. They were not permitted to give me the form. And instead, I had to write this paper. And when I wrote the paper, I realized what woke me up, what made me excited about my day, what I enjoyed learning, not more than other things, but what really helped organize my mind was the intersection of politics, economics, and sociology. And so I made up a degree where I studied those things and that moved me into this world. And that it was so, but it was the, the, the, the LA riots, you know, kind of got you into organizing. Yeah. I mean, I, again, my, my parents had had us, we'd been protesting, we'd done all of these little pieces. That was the time i was the lead and then i was a part of

an organization of students we i i left the organization after a little while because they were more interested in the protest piece i was i believe in protests but i've always believed that protests had to have a practical end yeah and for. And this is not at all a castigation of anyone else. There are those for whom activism is the thing and we need people who constantly hold us accountable and highlight what's happening in the system. And we've got people for whom being a part of the system is the work they do. It's how they deliver. I've always straddled those worlds. And so I, you know, I believe in the protest, but I also believe protest has to have a practical end.

And what I found is that I needed to be on the practical side. Right. And before I did it, I decided I needed to be in charge of the practical side because people didn't do what you told them. And because I'm not an authoritarian, I had to get elected to jobs that would permit you to fix the things that were broken. I think about it in this, my parents do direct action. Their lives have been about being in service to individuals. And that is critical. I have always been more fascinated by and drawn to how do you fix the

systems? Because you want the systems to work because there will always be people in need, no matter what problems we fix, new ones will crop up to take their place. And so you want people who are in the activist space, in the direct service space. I'm compelled by the system piece, which is how do you dismantle systems that don't work or don't, or work the way they're intended, but don't serve the people they should. And then how do you build new systems and put in place the infrastructure so that the old can't creep in and take over again? And that's where my focus is. And where'd you do the graduate work?

So I did a master's degree in public policy at the University of Texas in the LBJ School of Public Affairs. And then I did my law degree at Yale. And I focused on tax policy and public policy. So you've got it all covered. I try to learn stuff. Yeah.

And then where did you have time? But wasn't there, I know there was a, there was some writing going on. Yes. So during law school, my last year of law school, I wrote an article on, in fact, I wrote my thesis and got it published as a journal article on the operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax exemption. But I also wrote my first romance novel called Rules of Engagement. That sounds like it sounds like a spy novel. It was actually. It's that very astute. It started out as a spy novel.

Yeah, but I was writing it in 1999. Right. There were no black women who had ever been published writing an espionage. There were very few women who'd ever been published in espionage. And there were no novels with black women as the heroine. And so I made my spies fall in love and got a romance novel published. So you're able to find a way in. I try to be practical whenever I can. And did it sell well?

It sold pretty well. Yeah. Over the course. I mean, again, I was so I was writing Romantic Suspense as a black author at the very beginning of black writers in the romance space being taken seriously. There've been amazing women like Beverly Jenkins and Brenda Jackson, but there weren't a lot of black women who were given, who were taken seriously, especially in romantic suspense. Yeah. So I sold fairly well, well enough that they bought two more books and then I got picked up by St. Martin's press. And then I got picked up by Harper Collins. So my books have sold more than a hundred thousand copies, but I, I, as I put it, I could pay car notes with it. I could not buy a

car. Right. But you didn't write under your name. I did not because when I was about to publish my article on tax policy, it come out and Google had just become a thing. And if you pulled Stacey Abrams, it will pull out both my tax article. And the first thing I ever published, which was when I was in high school, I wrote this paper in my physics class and I got published in the journal of the astronomical society of the Atlantic at Georgia state university. And so no one was going to read a romance novel by Alan Greenspan or Stephen Hawking. So I had a separate identity for my romance. What's the name? Selena Montgomery. And OK, so people can go buy those books if they want.

They can indeed. Now, what's going on with you like today on a day like today with what's going on in Atlanta around the elections? And you have, I mean, you're a person in politics that has a very active nemesis in Brian Kemp. That, you know, do you, like, how much anger and spite do you have on a daily basis against him personally when you have these days? It would be disingenuous to say that isn't personal. Yeah.

But that kind of vendetta just takes a lot of energy and there's too much to do. But I like to quote Bruce Banner from The Avengers when he says, I'm always angry. Yeah. So I am. But it's a low simmering anger that helps me remember why I do what I do and when I'm tired and exhausted. But it's also, he's not good at his job. He has endangered our people. He is supporting a system and continues to support, in fact, was the architect of a system of voter suppression that is harming people on this very day. And he's the proof of the inverse relationship of voter suppression and voter participation.

Despite having the suppressive system that runs the gamut, we are seeing record turnout in part because people, when you tell them they can't have something, they may decide they don't want it, but you're not going to tell them they can't have it. And especially if they think that more is possible if they do, if they try. And also it was your efforts during your campaign for governor that got a lot of these people registered. You got a lot of folks registered. So the registration work started in 14 because to the earlier conversation, all of these things take time. There is no instantaneous result. Right. There is a demographic change happening across the South, happening around the country, but you have to harness it. And so I started an organization in 2014 to start registering the 800,000 unregistered

people of color in our state. The organization is now independent of me, but at this point, they've registered more than 400,000 of those people. So halfway there. I started Fair Fight because I watched voter suppression happen and wanted to build an organization that could begin to tackle it because not winning the election and being really mad wasn't going to solve the problem. And so I started an organization and then when I got past my first wave of just righteous anger, I started thinking about the national scope of this problem. And so we're operating in 18 states and we're helping fund and support folks in these states to tackle voter suppression. You were in the state house and

you were a state representative, right? I was 11 years. Yeah. So you know how it, you know, that was the hands-on experience of how it worked. Absolutely. I mean, I was, I was a legislator for 11 years. I was the leader of the Democrats for seven years. And when I would hear people, you know, bad mouth, either Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, like the hardest job, one of the hardest jobs in politics is to be in charge of the people who are going to lose. I mean right. I mean, that was it. Johnny Isakson actually once, he was the minority leader when he was, before he became a U.S. senator. He's a Republican.

And he was the leader of the Republicans back during the 130 years of Democratic dominance. And he once said, you know, minority leader is a job that has neither carrot nor stick. You can't promise and you can't punish. And, and, but that means if you're going to be successful at it, you learn how to navigate spaces. You learn how to work with people with whom you have nothing in common except the breath

you breathe. You learn how to take wins that don't look like wins to everyone else, but sometimes the victory is making sure people don't get hurt worse. That's the job. And I learned to be fairly effective at it. And I would like you to be vice president. Well, thank you. You would like to be vice president, right? I have mentioned it when asked, yes. Well, thank you. You would like to be vice president, right? I have mentioned it when asked, yes. And what do you see that role as being?

Well, I first see it as a role that Joe Biden is going to, he's going to decide what he needs and who he needs. My responses, which I think have been sort of blown way out of proportion, I answer questions as honestly as I can. And it's a question people seem to really like asking me. So I answer questions as honestly as I can. And it's a question people seem to really like asking me. So I answer it each time I'm asked. But fundamentally, it's the job of a lieutenant. The vice president is there to support the president's vision. Yeah. And personally, I think one of the spaces where we have seen the deepest erosion of our democracy is in the active exercise of our democracy. And Joe Biden has spoken to his belief that we need to do more.

I think that's an important job. I think it's going to be a critical job to think about recovery. I mean, to your point earlier, people seem to have forgotten that we're in the midst of a pandemic. The people who haven't forgotten are the ones who have lost their jobs and they're not coming back, who are economically decimated. And if you're a person of color, namely a black person, the likelihood of you getting this disease and dying from it is disproportionate to your part of the population. We have to think about how do we recover from a pandemic that is not going to dissipate. We've stopped having the daily alarms in part because we've now hit this sort of steady

state of infection that is abnormally high. And so the next president is going to have to figure out how do you deal with the systemic inequities, the racism and the infrastructure destruction done by the Republicans to rebuild communities that will simply have no other hope but governmental investment and governmental intervention. And we've got to think about it at the local, state, and federal level. And much as I encourage people to vote at every level, it's because the laws are different, the rules are different, the responsibilities are different.

And we're going to need to think about how do you serve on those three levels. Wow. Now, I don't know why, I don't really want to ask this question, but what do you see happening if that doesn't happen? I mean, look, our responsibilities don't change. Yeah. And our first obligation is to do what we can to make certain it doesn't happen. voter suppression, but also authentically engaging the protesters and demonstrators and not catering to this idea that if we just pat them on the head that things will go away, but that we legitimately engage and we validate the anger and the pain that we also remind them of the tools. Because one of the reasons for the book is that there are tools we can use. And we know they're out there because the Republicans have been using them for a while

to dismantle our access. I mean, that's why a whole chapter talking about the census, which to some people is about as interesting as my article on Mesopotamian astronomy. Yeah. is about as interesting as my article on Mesopotamian astronomy. Yeah. But the census is one of the most effective tools that we never use on the progressive side. It is not just a count of who we are.

It is a tally of what we need. And it's a roadmap for what we're going to do. And it lays out both economic and political power. And we act like it's a surprise every 10 years. Instead of treating it as what the Republicans treat it as, they see it as a weapon. They see it as a weapon of war against these very communities. I see it as a weapon of peace. If we can do this work with it, if we can energize and engage and actually follow it through, we start to invest more

in the communities who need it. We start to fund those new systems to replace the systems of inequity. But we can't do it if we don't get counted. And if they can tell the story that says that the nation isn't as diverse as we think it is, because that means the political power isn't diversified, means economic opportunities aren't diversified. It means those with power continue to have even more. And you just got to get people to fill it out.

It takes five minutes. It does. It takes, I've told people on my show, just do it. But think about it. So you had the president of the United States spend a year and a half scaring every person of every immigrant out of filling it out.

Yeah. Because of the citizenship question. If you're a black person or brown person who lives in a state that seems to be a carceral state where you do anything wrong, they're going to come and get you. There's been the rumor that if you fill out the census, they can use to arrest you. They can come get you. They can come get you. What I remind people of is if you have a utility bill or a cell phone, they already know where you are. Sure.

We'll have the census so you can get your money, but we can't ignore the fact that a lot of work has been done to create suspicion, to diminish people's belief that it actually works. It's not how long it takes. It's what does it mean if I do it and what does it mean if I don't? And that's my responsibility. That's what you're doing. And what does it mean if I don't? And that's my responsibility. That's what you're doing. It's we've got to tell people that the risk is actually low, but the reward is quite high. They've got to get past the fear of the risk. Now, when you said earlier, we were talking about you answering the question about vice president, about wanting to the job and how you look at the job.

Why do you think you get flack for just stepping up and answering honestly? So I think one is that I've been in this unusual position. I've gotten this question for 15 months, starting in March of 2019. No one usually gets the question because I had lunch with the vice president and a story got planted that we were talking about me running on a ticket with him. Right. So I got all these questions. I answered honestly.

Then I said, you don't run for second place in a primary, but people get the second half of my sentence. There was a comma. I said, but if I don't run and someone wants to consider me, I'd be honored to be selected. Right. And since that time, almost every time I've talked to a reporter, the question has come up. I believe in consistency and candor, so I give the answer.

And about a month ago, I was on television. I did like three shows back to back because I was trying to raise $100 million for the families on SNAP benefits who were not getting their stimulus checks. And at the same time, Brian Kemp was trying to kill Georgia by reopening the state after being one of the last people to close it without doing the necessary steps. And nobody remembers the first two thirds of the interviews. They just keep remembering the question I got at the end that I answered. So I understand that people misconstrue candor for campaigning. I wasn't. I do the same thing on pretty much any conversation. If you ask me a question, I'm going to answer it.

But do you feel that the response, do you think that it's relative to sexism or to? Oh, yeah. Look, part of what motivates me to be so candid but also confident is that I recognize that I don't look like what people are used to. And when they think about positions of power, when they think about higher office, it's there've only been two black women to be U.S. senators in American history. There's never been a governor.

There've only been 15 women ever, Black women ever elected to statewide office in the history of the nation. So I don't look like what they're used to, but I also know how people think. And if you want people to start to imagine more, you've got to tell them what that can look like. And as I've said before, I'm not just answering for myself. I'm answering for every woman of color, every young woman, every young person of color who imagines what they can be. And if I deny what I think I'm capable of, I give people permission to not only deny me, but to also deny them. And I was raised to do better. Well, thank you. Got me choked up.

Yeah, a couple of times just to hear you speak, I get choked up. So that means you have a big future in politics. Well, thank you. I have to tell you, Jason Kander is a dear friend. He and I met in a fellowship program. And I told him I would. He was very excited that I was going to be on your show. And I promised to let you know that he just thinks the world of you and he says, hi.

Oh, that's sweet. Yeah. He texted me the other day. He's a good guy. He really is. Well, thanks for talking to me, Stacey. I appreciate it. Mark, this has been wonderful and I deeply, deeply appreciate it.

Okay. Take care of yourself. You too. That was me and Stacey Abrams. again the book our time is now power purpose and the fight for a fair america is available i very much enjoyed talking to her um okay let's dig into the heart play a few chords. guitar solo Thank you. guitar solo Boomer lives. Yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Discover the timeless elegance of cozy where furniture meets innovation.

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