Name: Impact Initiative 2024: Profits, Politics And Purpose - Stacey Abrams On The Economics Of Diversity
Uploaded: 2024-10-09
Duration: 14 min 44 s
Description: Stacey Abrams Moderator: Diane Brady, Fortune

Stacey Abrams Moderator: Diane Brady, Fortune

Impact Initiative 2024: Profits, Politics And Purpose - Stacey Abrams On The Economics Of Diversity

Photography by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune

Conferences

Well, thank you. I've never gotten a cheer like that before, but thank you very much. They read your bio. You know, you know what I love about your bio and thank you so much for joining us is when we were said, how would you like to be described? I said she'd like to be described as author and activist. I thought that was very interesting. So, is that how you think of yourself right now? I mean, of course, we've had the whole pantheon of what you're doing. But I know you've written a lot of books, but the activist part I'm interested in. So when I was growing up, my mom, one day I was about 14, she said, you don't want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. What she meant was Stacy picks something you're doing too much stuff. What I heard was try everything, which proves the importance of communication. But to your question, I see the, the path that I have the work I'm trying to do. I know what my end goal is, but it's a freeway. And so my job is to pick the lane at the time that gets me where I need to be and be able to shift lanes depending on the traffic, depending on the obstacles and depending on the need. And so right now, my strongest utility is in the space of activism. And what are you in? Which lane is that? I'm in activism? I wanna say I was saying Fast Lane, but give me some sense of um you know, even that the whole idea of public office versus public service and I think, you know, obviously a force in the private sector as well. Tell me a little bit, how do you think about public office? Now? How are you doing? Because, you know, you get out a lot of people, I asked them, would you ever run for us? They'd be like no. And how would you run for office again? Of course. But public service is the intention. Public office is a tool. And so for me, public service is always the responsibility. Sometimes you think you have the right tool. Someone says no, we don't like yours. So you don't get to use it that day. But that doesn't mean you decide I'm never gonna hammer again. You just figure out when it's the most appropriate tool. But it's also, I think the tendency of us to conflate politics and policy, I believe in policy and politics should be a tool for the policy you want. Unfortunately, too often policy is the tool for the politics people want. And so the reason I don't conflate the two is that I'm always very clear that politics is something I do policy is the reason I do it. Let me ask about all the work that you've done around, you know, voter suppression, getting people out. How do you think about Georgia right now? Even the fact I'm reading that an individual can now basically point to their neighbor and say, you know what? I don't think that person should vote. So give us a lay of the land, Georgia, unfortunately continues to be a leading edge of voter suppression. And if you've heard me talk about this before, I'll say it very quickly. Voter suppression has three components. Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted? We have become very fixated in the last four years on that last piece, but that has not diminished the intention of those who would like to silence voters who have used the issue of, can you register and stay on the roll? So the mass challenge is what you're speaking to in 2021 Governor Brian Kemp signed into law an expansion of mass challenges and then in 2023 expanded it further. And so you don't have to be a neighbor. You just have to know how to spell. You can challenge any person and you can challenge multiple people. And now counties which used to be able to dismiss these. Basically, they knew it was a sham. They didn't want to spend the time because they had other things to do, like administer elections. They now have to parse through all of these challenges. And there have been more than 100,000 challenges in the state of Georgia just brought by people saying I don't think this person should be able to vote. That's a diminution of our democracy. This who you pick when you go into the ballot is partisan. The process should not be. And anytime the ability to cast a ballot depends on who's in office. Democracy is imperiled. And so in Georgia, unfortunately, we're still fighting. Not only can you register and stay on the rolls, we also have bad actors who are trying to make it hard to count the ballots, which is the hand, the, the state election board again and it sounds innocuous. Oh, we're going to count the ballots. Sure. They are more than 5.5. So right now it's, it's about 5.5 million likely voters in November. They are saying that you have to that by precinct three people have to count those pieces of paper. Do you know how long you can count grains of sand a little faster? And so the problem is it's not the intention, it's the process and the way the process is being designed, it will delay the counting of the ballots. Therefore, delaying the certification, which means that certain precincts will not be included in the final tally of the vote, which means it could invalidate Georgia's electoral college uh participation, which could alter the outcome of the election. This is intended as an act chaos, not an act of integrity. Let me ask you, but what are you? Obviously, the race is very close here. What are you seeing and, and let's start with that. Do you, do you have a sense that uh which way the election is going to go? Georgia is a purple state. And what that means is that you have to fight every election. We used to be blue for 100 and 30 years. Then we were red for about 25 years. Now, we're purple. And what purple means is that sometimes Democrats win, sometimes Republicans win, but every time you have to fight and that's really what differentiates a swing state or a battleground state from any other state when you don't know the outcome, waking up, you have to fight. And so we know it's gonna be a close election. It's, it's a toss up. And so it's a question of who is doing the work to turn out voters and on the nonpartisan side, those of us who are also trying to do the work of making sure that anyone who wants to cast a ballot, regardless of who they intend to vote for has the ability to do. So you know, it's interesting. I think you just came from Vermont. You've been going around the country. You were a storyteller. I said you are a prolific author actually. Can I just start with, when do you write? Usually when somebody either wants a book or their money back? Uh, what's your next book? Can you tell us your next book? Yes. So, it's called Code of Justice. It's the trilogy. It's the third book in my Avery Keane series. And thank you. And it's about, it comes out next May and it's about A I and health care and um the fact that we have no rules. There you go. It sounds like a dystopian non fiction. I, I don't know, I don't do dystopian iii I do improbable but very possible. So you should be mildly frightened. I think that we're going to call that the theme of our, but, but let's go to where we are today. You know, when you think about, you know, Biden really was supposed to be the bridge, you know, and, and tell me some sense of what is the story. How do we tell the story in a way that doesn't keep us so divine? What do you think when you go out, you're around the country to your point? It's a nonpartisan effort that you're making? What is the story that isn't being told? But let's be clear. I, I am very partisan. You're totally partisan. But no, no. But, but that's the reason I say I'm very partisan is that there's the process should be nonpartisan, but the fight to save our democracy should be bipartisan. That's an act of patriotism. And so the conversation I have is we may have different value systems, we may want different things, but we should have as a foundational fundamental uniting value, the protection of our democracy. And if we are willing to give that value, primacy, then we should all be voting a certain way. Everything else follows. But if we lose the foundational responsibility of preserving our democracy, nothing else happens because then we have descended into autocracy and authoritarianism and America is not immune. We have been on the cusp before and we pulled ourselves back. We are on the cusp again and we have to recognize it. But the other reality is part of the division is not just a question of who wants democracy or not. It's also a question of what country do we want. And this gets to the de I question the US has been in a corrective action state since its inception. When we started, we got it really, really, we got it right on paper and really wrong in every other way. And so we spent 248 years in this active engagement of writing the record, we call that diversity, equity and inclusion. And it's a movement that encapsulates so much. I know Elizabeth and Neil talked about it from the perspective and vantage point of race. But it's also the fact that it took until 1990 for persons with disabilities to get coverage. And because of the Chevron decision, the, the um Supreme Loper decision that eliminated Chevron deference, the AD A is in jeopardy because the AD A is actually written to be almost entirely determined by statute and by regulative like regulatory decision making. Meaning if you now have to take every single question to court. If you are a disabled person, the protections you enjoyed the day before that decision are now imperiled. And if we think it's not going to happen, look at the rob list versus Domino's Pizza case. When Domino's Pizza said they didn't have to fix their website to allow the visually impaired to use it because it wasn't in the law. But private sector, you know, like whether it's climate there is this instinct that the private sector may continue to do the right thing regardless of what's happening on the policy front, we have a room full of people here that for example, corporations are less inclined to talk about what they're doing, but they say they're still doing it. How important is it to be talking about the issues that you're, it, it's absolutely critical because we take for granted that we have shared values. But what the last few years have shown us is that if we don't talk about those values, we can't believe that they are implicit and shared completely by others. And the reason I use the AD A as an example is that right now, all of our attention is focused on race as a proxy for DE I. But if you can, if you can destroy DE I through race, that implicates every other protected class LGBT LGBT Q plus women title nine is in jeopardy. When you see these NCAA cases being brought, regardless of what you think about the outcome, they are attempting to weaken title nine. Because if you can weaken one facet of title nine, you can, you can completely eliminate it. That's why the case against Fearless Fund used the 1866 Civil Rights Act because you take the very law, you despise and try to invert it to justify destroying the entire infrastructure. I told you I do improbable. That's possible. That's what they're doing with the E I only. They're making it more possible every time. So coming back around to your question when I think about this election and what we can do together is we have to talk about it. We have to talk about the implications beyond the, the discomfort of. Well, I don't wanna talk about race or I don't wanna talk about gender. We should be talking about how do we protect each other? We should be talking about how do our stories unite us? We should be talking about the American dream and there are three pathways to the American Dream education, what you know, the economy, what you do and elections who's in charge de I has been absolutely essential in removing barriers to those three pathways to the American Dream. The Voting Rights Act was AD E I law. The AD A is AD E I law title nine is AD E I law title one which allowed, oh, I don't know. Some kid growing up in the Appalachian Mountains 30 years ago to go to a public school that was fully funded and who's now running for vice president? He's a beneficiary of de I, so we have to talk about it because people don't understand how they benefited from it or how this takes. I wanna ask, it sounds like a non sequitur a little bit. But what is your mindset? Give me a sense of I wanted to ask, you know, where you get the most joy, but I also don't want to diminish how are you just generally feeling right now about how things are going on? Are you hopeful less? I'm ok. So I, I don't do hope or, or, or optimism or pessimism. I describe myself as an Amelio risk which I know is an entirely made up word. So to ameliorate is to mitigate Amelia risk is not in the dictionary yet. No, here's the thing, I'm determined. I, I don't do, I, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know what I can do and So I focus on what are my actions, the way I put it is, the glass is half full but it's probably poisoned. So my job is to find the antidote. Don't drink anything at your table. Well, no, you can drink it. Just be prepared to do something about it. If it isn't what you think we spend so much time hoping that things will be the way they should be. I spend my time doing the things to make the world the way I think it should be. And that I think is what is so important about this room in rooms like this. There are very few rooms that are filled with people with the power to actually manifest what the outcome should be. And each of you has that ability through tweeting and retweeting and or whatever we call Xing. Now through using social media, through conversation, through amplification of the best intentions of America. We should be celebrating foundational values like diversity, equity and inclusion. We should not be afraid of them. We should be celebratory, we should be protecting them and we should be expanding them because it makes more money. It makes us better people, it makes the country wealthier. It increases the likelihood of our collective success and it increases the bottom line for every company that engages in it. So I believe that we celebrate it, we defend it, we expand it and if we do the right thing and we vote, please. God. Vote. Um, unless you're voting wrong. Which case stay home. No, I'm joking, I'm joking. I, I do not want people to stay home. Um, I just want you to change your mind and do the right thing. But we've got to, we've got to defend education, the economy and our elections and then we can get one quick last point. Where do you get the most choice? Is there a word? I have nieces and nephews who are extraordinary people who I want to see live the best lives imaginable and they have no filters, but they also have no limits to their imagination. And so my job is to make it possible. Please join me in. Thanking agent. Well, deserving of a standing ovation.