This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 2 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. We have a really great guest who’s going to join us—it’s Stacey Abrams. I’m sure people who are tuned in or listening know she was a state representative in Georgia. She had two great campaigns for governor. She played a big role in Georgia turning blue, and she’s really worked on voting rights and a lot of other important issues, both in the South and around the country. So Stacey, welcome.
Stacey Abrams: Thank you for having me.
Bacon: So I want to talk about the work you’re doing now. You’re helping run a group called American Pride Rises, and part of what it’s doing is defending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And you’ve written a lot about how DEI is essential to democracy—which I think a lot of people don’t think of as connected ideas. So explain to people why defending DEI is important as we try to fight for and defend democracy right now.
Abrams: Thank you so much, Perry. For me, it’s all of a piece. I’ve been working on voting rights for decades. I started with a table at Spelman College as a freshman—was the loneliest 17-year-old in college because nobody stopped at my table.
And I’ve always understood that democracy is organized around who needs what and who has a voice in making it possible. And in the United States, the communities that have been the most isolated from power, the most isolated from opportunity, have been vulnerable communities—people of color, women, religious minorities, basically anyone who is considered on the margins.
And in a nation that was predominantly white and mostly male with power, everything we’ve done since the founding of this country has been about how we share more and more of that power. That’s what democracy is—it’s about shared power.
And in the United States, because we like acronyms and because we like to be efficient, we have lumped all of the communities that have had to fight for their share of that power under the umbrella of DEI. The way I tell people to think about it is: diversity means all people, equity means fair access to opportunity, and inclusion means respect for belonging.
Whether we’re talking about a Revolutionary War fought so that, in part, white men who did not own land had the same rights as the landed gentry, or we’re talking about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to guarantee African Americans access to citizenship and the perquisites thereof, the 19th Amendment which allowed women the right to vote—actually white women, until we got the Voting Rights Act, which gave Black women equal power—whether we’re talking about Native Americans getting citizenship in 1924, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Title I which expanded public education to actually include rural children and children of color and poor kids, or the Respect for Marriage Act less than a decade ago—these are all DEI.
DEI isn’t just about Black kids going to Harvard. It is about any law or rule or regulation or policy change in the United States that created corrective action to allow more people to share power. And if democracy is about how we have shared power, then DEI is how we guarantee that shared power includes all who are eligible in the United States. That’s why DEI is in the DNA of democracy.
Bacon: You said DEI doesn’t just mean Black kids go to Harvard. And it also doesn’t mean—it’s become this thing where DEI means you had a training at your workplace and you didn’t like it. And you and I are probably for certain kinds of training, but it’s much deeper than that. How do we get people to think about DEI the way you said it, as opposed to the way the right—and we’ll come back to the center-left—has defined it?
Abrams: I would actually say that the right has properly defined DEI, and we know that because if you read Project 2025, it is one of the most oft-cited issues that they attack, and they mean for it to cover the waterfront.
For example, they understand that DEI includes the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that’s why, under this regime, when they eliminated federal compliance with DEI, one of the first actions taken was that the Department of Energy ceased to enforce Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act. What that means is that buildings built in the United States that have to get a seal of approval from the Department of Energy no longer have to comply with sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The right has long understood that DEI is the body of law and the body of regulation that allows everyone to participate. But they also recognize that the left has largely been embarrassed by the necessity, and therefore they lean into the tendency to demonize our language. And what happens on the side of those who know what we need—we become so chagrined that we spend our time apologizing for it or trying to change the language to accommodate their distaste, as opposed to recognizing they’re going after it for a reason.
And so the work that we do at American Pride Rises is to expand people’s understanding of what everyday DEI looks like. DEI meant that when veterans in the United States, after this administration took power—again, another example of what they did when they slashed DEI—a lot of vets lost their small business loans, because many veterans in the United States were covered under DEI protections. They got access to funding. They got access to education.
It was necessary because that was a population that was being underserved. They got special access, corrective access, expanded access—and all of those things can be separate but interchangeable. And in the process, they became part of DEI. So when the right, in this regime, canceled DEI protections, they canceled them for people who put their lives on the line, who are disabled because they were in U.S. service. And that was DEI.
So a lot of our work is expanding how people understand it, to comport with what the right has done to demonize it and deconstruct it.
Bacon: So in some ways you’re saying that the right understands DEI and the left, or the Democrats, either don’t understand it or are not invested in defending it? You’re saying, to some extent, they understand what DEI does more than we do?
Abrams: They have a more expansive recognition of it, because what tends to happen—this has worked very well on the right for eons. They have this, I call it a triad. They demonize our language. They recognize that there is a corrective action, an expansion of power that is happening in this country, and they immediately attack the language.
So let’s think back to abortion. The right actually supported abortion for years and then changed their minds. Gerald Ford supported abortion rights. They realized they could weaponize it and suddenly started demonizing the language. When you demonize something, you make the recipient think that they are wrong—because when you can control someone’s language, you often control how they think about a thing.
They demonize, and while we’re so busy trying to make them like us again—like the language we use—they then move to litigation. They sue to dismantle whatever corrective action has been taken, whatever expansion of power has happened. And then they legislate to ensure you never get it back.
And so we watched that happen with abortion rights. We watched it happen with voting rights. We’ve watched it happen with education. And the reason I use those three is that in America, if you want to access the American dream—which is the intention of our democracy, that we all get to have this fulsome life—there are three parts to it: education, what we know; the economy, what we do; and elections, who’s in charge.
But when you can convince a community, a people, an organization, a party that what they’re asking for is somehow unjust—if you can embarrass them into thinking that if they were just better at it, they wouldn’t need it—then we ignore the systems that are being put in place to either constrain our access or take it back. And that’s why we have watched the left capitulate to the insult, while the right uses that capitulation and our instinctive chagrin to further expand their dominion.
They’ve been clear. They do not want multiple communities to participate. Mike Lee has said that too many people are in democracy—I’m paraphrasing him poorly.
Bacon: He actually said that, yes.
Abrams: And he’s a U.S. senator who said this. We have watched J.D. Vance lift up white supremacy and Christian nationalism. We have watched the president of the United States suggest that women are unfit for leadership, and certainly unfit for power. Why would we then be surprised that they would oppose any of the rules and laws that allow that participation to be not only manifest but effective?
Bacon: Talking about our side—I guess what I read a lot is there’s this thing called “wokeness” that I don’t really know what it is, and Democrats lose when they are too woke but win when they talk about the economy. You might agree with the last part. But that’s generally implied in five New York Times op-eds a week. So when you hear that, how do you respond to it?
Abrams: OK, let’s start with what “woke” means. “Woke” is actually a term of art created by Black women, and it referred to the need to be awake to the threats that you face. If you know how to hunt, wokeness should make sense to you. You don’t want to be asleep when danger is facing you. So wokeness simply says: we should be not only aware of but intentional about our response to those dangers, those threats, and aware of possibilities and pushing for those possibilities.
So think about who has been angry about the idea of wokeness: anyone who’s been forced into actual competition. If you were in a protected class of people who were guaranteed access to education because of legacy, guaranteed access to the economy because of barriers to women, people of color, the disabled—all these populations that are now competing with you for these jobs—if you now have to participate in a competitive system, what are you going to say? That the system isn’t fair. And how are you going to say it? You’re going to blame the people who are now making you have to work a little harder.
What the left has done—and I wouldn’t put the New York Times on the left—is they have taken the critique and internalized it as though it’s valid. And you see this happen with anyone who’s the victim of abuse. There is a tendency to internalize what you’ve been told is wrong with you.
So the notion that communities fighting for fair access to housing, to healthcare—that somehow should be demonized—is the weapon of those who oppose those communities having access.
Then you layer that on top of elections. We did not lose an election because of wokeness. The populations who vote for Democrats are populations that have benefited from us being awake to the systemic barriers that make it impossible or very difficult to fully participate in America—including those who want to participate in the economy.
Which is why affordable housing and healthcare are not woke issues in a way that should be demonized, but woke issues in the sense that we now see the systems that make it harder for us to get what we need. Who is telling us it’s a bad idea? The people who don’t want you to have access.
And so it is like listening to the arsonist tell you about the dangers of fire. We cannot do that. And what’s happening unfortunately with mainstream media—especially with the editorial direction we see in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, because they’re all of a piece in this—is a tendency to say that any community that does not have everything they need is simply not working hard enough. It is gaslighting at the highest level with the best language.
The work that I do—not only with American Pride Rises, but with the 10 Steps campaign—is about how we remember how power is built, how it is shared, and how it is reclaimed. And that cannot happen if we allow people to tell us we’re not entitled to that power to begin with. That is the through line of all of those op-eds and all of those screeds and all of those arguments—that we don’t need to think about the systems, we just need to think about the outcome.
Bacon: I want to shift a little bit to the last few weeks, which have been rough to watch—basically, Republican states are redrawing districts to eliminate Black congressmen from them, and I think they’re going to do that with state legislators coming up soon. So just generally, what is your reaction to what Louisiana—every day we have a new person redistricted out of their seat. What is your general reaction to that, and what do we do about it?
Abrams: Again, I draw a through line from the work I did when I was a student at Spelman to today. In the 20th century, when you and I were younger, we were fighting for expansion of voting rights—getting more people to participate. We wanted more engagement, and that’s because we had the Voting Rights Act.
You and I were born after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. My parents were not. My parents were in college when the Voting Rights Act became effective. And so they grew up without having access to not just democracy but the ability to participate in how decisions are made.
Then you and I—we are from a generation that benefited from having a law that said, no matter which state you lived in, you now all have to comply with the notion of one person, one vote. And you have to comply, no matter what state you’re in, with the idea that using someone’s race, color, and creed against them is no longer permissible.
And since the day the Voting Rights Act passed, there has been an assiduous attempt to dismantle it. And they did it in 2013 with Shelby v. Holder. They did it in 2021 with the Brnovich decision. They did it in [2019] with Rucho v. Common Cause, which said partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable. That was a precursor to being able to say that if you call everything that affects people of a certain race “partisanship,” you can do it and it’s fine. And then you capstone it with the Callais decision.
And so what we have watched unfold since April 29 is the arms race to take away political power from communities that are politically inconvenient. They are starting with Black communities, because every time they’ve tried to dismantle and harm democracy in America, they start with Black people—but they never stop there.
And so what I want those listening to us to recognize is: it may be centered in the South now, but it’s heading west, it’s heading north. It’s heading for any community where power being held by someone else is inconvenient. You cannot protect democracy by only protecting those in the majority. You have to protect those who need those protections the most, if those protections are to mean anything.
And therefore, what we’ve watched happen in Tennessee—where I went to testify—in Mississippi, where they luckily had to pull back; in Alabama, where they intentionally dismantled Black power; in Louisiana, where they canceled an election; in South Carolina, where luckily those state senators said not now—but what’s happened in Florida, what’s happening in Texas, what’s going to happen in Georgia in two weeks—it’s all about wresting power away.
They may use race as the proxy, but this is a fight for power. This is a fight for authoritarians to have more, and for people who believe in democracy and who need democracy to have less.
Bacon: What do we do with this argument from Roberts and Alito and so on—which is basically that any consideration of race, any time race is thought of in any way, we can’t talk about race? The way to—what does Roberts say? Basically trying to erase any conversation, as if the country’s been equal the whole time—as opposed to acknowledging the inequality as part of what we have to do. How do we deal with those kinds of arguments—that the key is to not talk about race, ever, basically?
Abrams: Perry, you know this as a student of history. Jim Crow laws regarding voting rights came after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The 15th Amendment said you can’t use race to deny someone the right to vote. The Jim Crow laws that passed in the wake of the 15th Amendment were race-neutral. They never mentioned race.
Bacon: Did not say “Black people cannot vote” directly. Yes.
Abrams: Never said it. Never said it once. What they said was: you have to pay a poll tax. Who didn’t have money? People who were recently enslaved. They said you have to pass a literacy test. Who was likely illiterate? People who were legally prohibited from learning to read.
But when that got harder and harder, they also had another rule. And this is the perfect example of why race neutrality is a fallacy. Those same communities who had lesser literacy because they weren’t slaves but were sharecroppers, the same white folks who weren’t able to pay the poll taxes because they had sub-minimum-wage jobs—they were told: as long as your grandfather could vote before the Civil War, you’re fine.
That meant it was race-neutral, but it used conditions that only applied to certain races to provide protection.
But when that got harder and harder to maintain—because more and more Black people went to HBCUs, got better jobs, started creating means of production and paying themselves and their comrades more—what happened then was that they started redrawing districts, and they started concentrating power. And you had at-large districts, because if the population was too small to have power without districts drawn to represent their community of interest, you could shut them out. That’s how you end up with runoffs. That’s how you end up with massive districts. That’s how you get gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering had existed before, but it got perfected by those who opposed the racialization of America—meaning Black people could vote. And so anytime you hear “race-neutral,” what you should hear is that we do not want races that we do not like to have power that we do not want to cede, for purposes that may not benefit us in the future.
There is no race neutrality in America. That’s like saying gender neutrality exists. It doesn’t. We are human, and immutable characteristics exist. But they’re also not just visible—they’ve been baked into the construct and the context of how we live our lives.
But what is neutral is the decision not to do anything about it. This is a moment where race neutrality is cowardice. Now is the time for us to recognize that when race is used as a proxy to diminish democratic participation, to undermine the fealty we have to one another, then race neutrality is an act of cowardice. We have to acknowledge that race exists, that race is used and weaponized against us, and that while they may start with a race you’re not necessarily that worried about, they’re coming for a race near you pretty soon.
Bacon: So what is the redress? There have been some lawsuits filed against these gerrymanders, and I think some have been delayed. But is there any redress here? Are we going to wake up next week and there are no Black congressmen and very few Black state legislators? Or what can we do, both people in the South and people outside of the South?
Abrams: We’ll start with the last part. Everyone in the country needs to be concerned. Sixty percent of the Black population in America lives in the South, but roughly half of the Latino population lives in the Sun Belt. While the Callais decision focused on Louisiana and the South, we have to remember that in 1975, because of John Roberts’s mentor, William Rehnquist—who used poll taxes and literacy tests to deny Latinos and Native Americans the right to vote in Arizona before he became a Supreme Court justice—this is not just about what happens to Black people. But Black people are always the first line of ignominy in the attacks on democracy.
And so what we have to recognize, first and foremost, is that this is a national issue. That is why I am so proud of states across this country who are not racing to weaponize—they’re racing to neutralize. This is the one time where neutralization is actually good. This is about saying, You’re not going to gain advantage by creating harm. That is a genuine good.
Bacon: California and Virginia—
Abrams: Exactly.
Bacon: OK.
Abrams: They are not trying to expand the number of seats just to have them. They said, If Texas, if you’re going to take this number of seats, we’re going to neutralize the number of seats you get. I think that is good. It’s jury nullification with voting. I’m fine with that.
Bacon: OK. Sure.
Abrams: But the next thing we have to do is recognize that we had more than 90 million Americans who did not participate in the 2024 elections. That is more than enough to win races across the country—and that’s not presuming that everyone shares our political values. But the more activated people are in the participation in elections, the more likely we are to get the benefits that all of us need.
And this goes back to your very first question about wokeness and the economy versus questions of identity. Identity matters when the economy matters. You can’t get to affordability if the reason you are denied access is that the system is organized against you, either intentionally or benignly. And so the more people who participate in a democracy, the fairer that democracy tends to be. It is not a given, but it is more likely.
And so we’ve got to increase registration, we’ve got to increase turnout. We also have to recognize that this is a national project. This is not about ignoring the South, once again—this is about understanding that we’re in this together.
And so over the course of the summer and heading into the fall, there are going to be organizations across the country that are participating—a number of organizations that I helped to start through Fair Fight, Fair Count. But also, if you look at the 10 Steps campaign, which I started—10stepscampaign.org—we’re helping to aggregate organizations and groups that are doing this work. All Roads Lead South—allroadsleadtothesouth.org—has a list of opportunities for participation. We’ve got to fight to defend Southern access, because it’s the way we protect everyone’s access.
Bacon: Last question. I want to talk about what’s happening in Georgia, the state you’ve been involved in politics in. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the primary. Jon Ossoff has raised a lot of money, been polling really well. They’re now joined together—they had a joint rally. How do you feel about their chances in November?
Abrams: Georgia is a swing state, and they can win. We can win up and down the ballot. We have the opportunity actually to flip the State House in Georgia.
And so I’m working hard to encourage voting up and down the ballot. We’ve got to vote not only for our senator and our governor, but we have to have a lieutenant governor who can help in the State Senate. We’ve got to flip the State House so we have a Democratic speaker.
We have to have a secretary of state who actually fights for all Georgians and not just for the Georgians he likes—he got a lot of credit for not committing treason, but he also was the architect of a lot of voter suppression. And so I’m looking for a new secretary of state who actually defends the right to vote for all Georgians.
We have to have an attorney general who sues on behalf of Georgians and doesn’t sue to protect those companies and those who would attack Georgians. So we’ve got to vote up and down the ballot, and I think we have a ticket that can make that happen. We’ve got to get through these runoffs, but I think on the other side, Georgia remains the state to watch and the state to win.
Bacon: On that note, Stacey Abrams, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
Abrams: Thank you for having me.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
