Stacey abrams on growing up poor full#

How does it feel, 28 years later, to watch as names are finally being taken off buildings, flags are being burned, people are removing statues by themselves, and paintings depicting Confederate figures are coming down slowly but surely? Why do you think it took so long? I saw video footage of you burning the Confederate flag. JM: At one point in your book, you recount protesting emblems of the Confederacy while you were in college at Spelman in the early 1990s. That is this moment, and the New American Majority is how we do it. But what I’ve learned from my parents and my grandparents and from the long sweep of history is that we have been waiting for this moment where our desires can be met with our capacity.

I finished it up the first few days of 2020. We have the right to believe that Ahmaud Arbery should not have been murdered in the streets and that Rayshard Brooks should not have been killed by police. And then a fair America-we have the right to demand equal justice under the law. We have to know we have a purpose, which has been revealed by what the pandemic has shown us about what is happening to Black and brown communities that are being decimated by Covid-19 and the economic inequities that are not only being visited upon our country writ large but upon those essential workers, who, by law or by practice, don’t have the ability to take care of themselves and have to stand on those front lines. It is understanding that this New American Majority, because of how many of us there are and because of the proof points of our capacity, we have to know we’ve got the power to influence what happens next. We are in a pitched battle driven by a public-health crisis, an economic collapse, and a reckoning with structural racism and systemic inequities, and the battle is not simply against those things.

Stacey abrams on growing up poor full#

STACEY ABRAMS: The full title of the book is Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, and I think that there has been nothing in our recent memory that has crystallized that subtitle more than the last six months. How do you feel this New American Majority has evolved or changed over the past six months? We’re all in the middle of Covid-19 right now, and we’re in a reckoning with racial justice and the stark and tragic effects of inequality.

In the time between when you wrote the book and when it was published in June, we saw our country gripped by this pandemic. You believe these folks are a key force in the upcoming federal elections. JANELLE MONÁE: In your book Our Time Is Now, you write about what you call the New American Majority-the people of color, young people, moderates and progressives, who galvanized behind you and your race for governor of Georgia in 2018.

You can’t give up the power you have trying to get the power you want.