Powerful Words from Stacey Abrams

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Stacey Abrams: I Know Voting Feels Inadequate Right Now
Just hear me out.

By Stacey Abrams

Ms. Abrams is the founder of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action.
June 4, 2020



Voting feels inadequate in our darkest moments. I recognize that.

When you’re watching a man’s death on a video loop, hearing him say “I can’t breathe.” When those words echo what another man said in his last moments, his life also taken by the police. When a woman who saved lives is shot dead in her home in a botched police raid. When a black man is murdered for jogging, his killers left free to celebrate. When you know there is a list of deaths so long that most people can’t keep all the names in their head.

To say that the answer is to go cast a ballot feels not just inadequate, but also disrespectful. “Go vote” sounds like a slogan, not a solution. Because millions of us have voted. And too many still die. The moment requires many things of each one of us. What I am focused on is the work of showing people, in concrete ways, what voting gets us. And being honest about how much work voting requires.

Across America, would-be voters continue to turn away or opt out, discouraged by the permanence of inequality, the persistence of voter suppression. Their fear is again and again made real by stories of neighbors denied provisional ballots in Georgia and lines that wind around city blocks in Milwaukee because polling locations are shut down and alternatives never arrive. By undermining confidence in the political system, modern-day suppression has swapped rabid dogs and cops with billy clubs for restrictive voter ID laws and tangled rules for participation. And those who are most vulnerable to suppression become the most susceptible to passing on that reluctance to others.

Read More:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/stacey-abrams-voting-floyd-protests.html

Trust me, this is well worth the read.

Thank you Stacey, please proceed.