Defender of voting rights Stacey Abrams She said on Tuesday that she felt punished and insulted in the summer of 2020 while questioning her ability to hold the job of U.S. vice president when then-candidate Joe Biden was considering choosing her as a running mate. Abrams spoke with author NK Jemison on the first day of the South by Southwest festival, which is being held almost this year.
“I was punished for refusing to refute and pretend I didn’t have the ability to do the job because I didn’t have the title and positions that people were used to seeing,” Abrams said, adding that he was asked an issue that very few people have to contend with.
“There were all these insults as opposed to looking at the fundamental question. They asked me the question that white men don’t ask me, ‘Are you qualified?’ Abrams said.
The former Georgia secretary of state said there is “absolutely a nuisance” to society with “the audacity of people of color thinking we belong in the spaces and declaring that we deserve access.”
In 2018, Abrams lost the race for Georgia governor against Republican Brain Kemp by less than 55,000 votes. He said the “blockade of so many thousands of voters certainly had an impact on the outcome” and jokingly referred to the trajectory of his career as “an asymptote of success”.
“I’m very, very close to crossing the line, but never crossing it,” Abrams said. He noted that he has been able to become more involved in voting rights activism “due to an act of treachery on the part of someone in power who decided that people who looked like me should not be they were supposed to be so active and proactive in their politics. “
Abrams, who comes out with a new political fiction book “While Justice Sleeps,” attributed much of his success in politics to narration and voter participation.
“You have to focus the voter, focus the citizen, the person in the narrative,” Abrams said. “If it’s someone else and they can’t benefit or be victimized, you’ll give a reason for not paying attention.”
Abrams, who founded Fair Fight Action in 2018, a national organization that aims to address voter suppression, said voters must remain vigilant about the responsibility of elected officials “because between elections is when life passes. “.
He said the more than 250 proposals to restrict voting to states across the country are trying to reverse the progress of voters who ran in record numbers in the last election cycle to make their voices heard.
“We worked to involve the highest number of communities of color as active voters in Georgia in the history of the state … we did so by telling them a story about their power,” Abrams said. “And now we have 253 bills across the country trying to undo their performance.”
Last week, Georgia’s state senate narrowly passed a bill that will repeal the vote for absence without excuse if the law is signed. During the November election, 1.3 million voters in Georgia used email voting to vote.
The proposed new legislation also creates stricter identification requirements for those who want to vote by mail and would make Georgia one of the most difficult states to apply for a no-vote.
On Sunday, during an interview with CNN, Abrams described as “racist” the push by Republican lawmakers to add more voting restrictions and a “Jim Crow redux in suit and tie.”
“The only connection we can find is that he voted more people of color and changed the election result in a direction that Republicans don’t like,” Abrams told CNN. “Instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting primarily for communities of color,” he added.
Abrams spoke on the first day of the South by Southwest virtual festival, which is held annually in Austin, Texas. Other prominent politicians speaking at the festival later this week are Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former President George W. Bush.