Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Welcome to Chatham House, what an exciting afternoon. It’s wonderful to see all of you. I am Leslie Vinjamuri. I know many of you. I’m Head of the US and Americas Programme here at Chatham House. I am really delighted and tremendously honoured to welcome Stacey Abrams to Chatham House to speak about democracy and the politics of identity. It is an honour for all of us. Thank you for making time. I know you don’t have a lot of time and this is really an extraordinary opportunity for us.
Today’s event, as I’m sure you know, is on the record. I encourage you to tweet and I really encourage you to put your phones on silent, ‘cause we don’t want to miss any of the words that we’re about to hear from all of you and from Stacey Abrams. Stacey Abrams doesn’t need an introduction, so I’ll keep it brief. She is Author, serial entrepreneur, Non-Profit CEO and political leader. Stacey Abrams served 11 years in Georgia’s House of Representative. Seven of those were as minority leader. In 2018, she became the Democratic nominee for the Governor of Georgia. She was the first African-American woman to become the nominee of Gov – for Governor of a major party in the United States. As we all know here, the mid-term elections across the United States and especially this particular election, were the most watched mid-term elections, certainly for Europeans and for those of us outside of the United States, that we’ve ever had.
The race for Governor of Georgia was extraordinary. It had a record turnout amongst African-American voters, Latino voters and Asian voters, and I tried to get some of the numbers from Stacey Abrams and her team, in the last 20 or 30 minutes, and I’ll give you a few. I might be wrong, but I – what I scribbled down, there were three times the number of Latinos – Latino turnout. Latino voters turned out three times relative to the previous election. Three times the number of Asian-American voters turned out and 1.2 million Afro Amer – African-American voters turned out. That was up from 700,000 voters in the previous gubernatorial elections. How many young – we have a lot of young people here today. 139% turnout amongst the youth voters, relative to previous elections, so that’s extraordinary. $42 million was spent on this election, more than had ever been spent on a gubernatorial election in the state of Georgia. This will make a lot of sense to the Americans in the room. You might need a bit more context from Stacey Abrams and others to understand how significant that is, and this is the thing that I loved hearing the most. Stacey Abrams visited every single one of the 159 counties in the state of Georgia, as part of her campaign. That is an extraordinary effort and it was an extraordinary campaign to watch, for a variety of reasons, regardless of one’s political positions.
I would be remiss in not mentioning that Stacey Abrams is a graduate of Spelman College, a college that historically, has been dedicated to the education of women of African descent. She is also a graduate at the University of Texas and a graduate of Yale Law School, and she is one of six siblings, the second one of six siblings. So, we are delighted and honoured to have you here today and we look forward to hearing your remarks. Thank you [applause].
Stacey Abrams
Thank you [applause]. Thank you, Leslie, for such a generous introduction. Thank you, Chatham House. Yes, you should tweet, but please pretend like you’re paying attention to me, as you do so. In 2018, I stood for election to become the Governor of Georgia, and one of the reasons I have been so bullish about the idea of running for Governor is that I understand the way politics works in the United States. Most of the seismic changes we have seen in our body politic, and how our people are treated, does not happen at the federal level. It’s actually state policy and regardless of your belief in these issues, when we saw the rise of mass incarceration, particularly of African-Americans, in the United States, that did not begin with federal policy. It began with a Governor in California, who decided to increase the rate of incarceration, based on a class of communities that were treated separately and differently.
When we saw the erosion of the social safety net in the United States in the 1990s, that did not begin with Bill Clinton and the Welfare Reform Act. It began with the Governor of Wisconsin, who had been experimenting with how to restrict and narrow who had access to the social safety net. Recent issues in the United States around gun violence came about, in part, because of a law called Stand Your Ground that permits people to shoot to kill if they believe that they are protecting their home or their castle and that law became most aggressive, not at the federal level, but through the Governor of Florida. And lest anyone forget Jim Crow, the insidious, offensive and deeply affective racial segregation laws, never had a single federal law. Jim Crow was state-based legislation.
Identity has always been a part of how we live our lives America and it has often been not only a leader on social issues, but in electoral issues. And for me, becoming Governor was incredibly important because it was an opportunity to stand in the space that has so often led to, either the advance of identity and the advance of a person’s actual citizenship, or the restriction thereof. And so, I wrote, in a recent article, in response to Francis Fukuyama, that I love identity politics. They work for me, because I have an identity. I have an identity that is grounded in my race, that is grounded in my gender, an identity that is grounded in my regionalism, an identity that is grounded in my religion, and each of these pieces are immutable parts of me or intrinsic parts of me.
The immutable characteristics of race are often seen and used as a method of oppression and repression. The conversation about religion has become a very potent one in the United States and around the world. The issues that we see embedded in identity cannot be divorced from our politics. In fact, electoral politics is often a lagging social indicator. We don’t get to the electoral piece until long after the social norms and the divorcing of people from their rights has happened, based on their identity. And this has been true from the inception of the United States and I will use the US as a proof point, although I will argue, of course, that this is not endemic to the US.
We know that the marginalised did not create identity politics. From the very beginning, from the inception of the United States Constitution, there was a three fifths compromise. The decision that Blacks only constituted three fifths of humans and therefore, were eligible to be treated as chattel, that was an identity foisted upon Blacks simply because of the difference in our skin tone. We know that Native Americans, those who inhabited the United States long before anyone settled there, were denied citizenship in the United States until 1924. We often like to believe that post-Trail of Tears we came to our senses, but no. It took until 1924 to grant them citizenship and until the 1960s, 1968, before the Bill of Rights was actually applied to the Native American population and they still do not enjoy every facet of the Bill of Rights.
Identity politics became law in the United States in 1882, through the Chinese Exclusion Act, which followed the Page Act. The United States imported Chinese labourers to build the railroads, to build the West, but then decided, through the Page Act in 1875, to deny the right of Chinese labourers to bring their wives over, and because that wasn’t quite as effective as they thought, in 1882 they just said no more could come. It was the first anti-immigration law passed in the United States and it continued for more than a century.
We know that each time these laws pass, they were not passed indiscriminate of identity, they were passed because of identity and therefore, we have to acknowledge the problem of identity politics, which is that we pretend that identity doesn’t matter, until it becomes inconvenient, until it starts to harm the majority population, or until it starts to unsettle what has become normative in our communities.
The other challenge of identity politics is that it insists that the marginalised should not demand public acknowledgement of their grievances. We know that in the United States recent conversations about Black Lives Matter has caused a great deal of backlash. The argument is that Black lives should not have to have a hashtag or demand for movement, because they shouldn’t be separate from the rest of the lives. In fact, those who were the most dismissive retort to Black Lives Matter by saying all lives matter. Well, yes, we would like to believe that all lives matter, but Black lives are most in danger and this notion that the public acknowledgement of that grievance is somehow erosive and corrosive to our body politic is nonsense. We cannot be a United States if people within our country do not feel safe, if they feel compelled to articulate that their specific identity, it bears a threat to their existence.
We know that current demographic and social trends are expediently moving, that technological advances are making identity even more obvious and more easily shared and because of that, embracing diversity has to be the way we approach things, because this false notion of uniformity ignores daily experience, and those who deride identity politics, they depend on a number of misjudgements. Francis Fukuyama, for example, argues that, “Economics, more than race or gender or other marginalisations, should carry the day.” But it ignores that race and class have always been intrinsically linked, whether in the United States or abroad, because when you fight for class, but ignore the racial constrictions or the gender constrictions, or the fact that in the United States you can be fired from your job from being a member of the LGBTQ community, then you cannot divorce class and economics from marginalised communities. We have to recognise that there are wide substrates of inequality and those substrates have to be acknowledged if they are going to be addressed.
But why is this a problem? It’s a problem because identity politics have been seized upon as a way to hold the marginalised accountable for daring to express their grievance. We are blaming the victims for acknowledging that they are victims and saying please stop making me a victim, and we do that by saying that they’re seeking redress for their oppression is somehow offensive to the rest of us. But the reality is that as we change, as we become a more democratic and diverse society, we are they and acknowledging that we are they is not harmful to us. In fact, it is how democracies become more vibrant, more inclusive and more resilient. I know that social media has played a large part in the recent advance of identity politics. Because of Facebook, you can take a video of a man being shot in his car simply because someone believes that he is inherently dangerous because he is Black, and that video lives on in infamy. Because of Twitter, the marginalised can unify and they can create a hashtag that amplifies their voices across the entire platform, forcing change, like #MeToo, and we know that Instagram is just dangerous.
But we have to recognise that those who benefit from repression are those who prefer this more comfortable narrative of uniformity. They prefer to think that we all have the same experiences, in part because they never have to accept or acknowledge any difference. The consequences for them, then, have been jarring. That’s why we have this pushback and this weaponization of the language of identity. I grew up a Black woman in the Deep South and I learned early that sometimes you can’t beat ‘em, you just take what they say and use it against ‘em, like running for Governor, and in this case, I refused to let the term ‘identity politics’ be used as a diminution of our power. Instead, I say we should seize it, use it, and amplify it, because these changes have to be encouraged.
Activists and political challengers have to be able to make demands and they have to be able to articulate why those demands are necessary. We know that electoral politics have been the last refuge of holding identities hostage, because as long as you can deny women the right to vote, and in this recognition of the International Women’s History Day and the 100 year anniversary of Suffragettes, we know that the right to vote has been denied so frequently because it is the most potent weapon to keep people’s voices from being heard in their politics, which means the policies do not reflect their needs.
Most tacitly and explicitly, we have to acknowledge that certain members of class are denied agency in those classes, that women who are part of the working population need the Family Medical Leave Act because they give birth more often than men do. We know that these moments have to be acknowledged and that we have to work to embed them, but we also have to acknowledge that there is universal benefit to these advances, that when Black lives matter, brown lives matter, that when people cannot be shot simply for being who they are, then the rest of us are made safer. We have to acknowledge that men benefit from the Family Medical Leave Act because they have children they need to take care of or parents who are ageing. We have to acknowledge that religious freedom has to be true freedom. It cannot be constrained to only the Christian community, because if we want Islamophobia to be diminished, we have to acknowledge the right of members of the Muslim community to speak up and speak for their communities.
For me, it’s been a conversation about being a Black woman and so, I’m going to start with that. I talk about my identity. You cannot miss me. I am a tall, statuesque, Black woman. I have natural hair. I am not of an indiscriminate tone, and I own my identity, in part because I need others to see that my identity is an opportunity for access and for opportunity, not for being pushed aside. The moment I stepped forward to run for Governor, there were those who said I could not win because of my race and my gender. And these were often friends, people I’d known for years, people who’d invested in my campaigns for the House and for leadership. But when I called to say, “By the way, I’m running for Governor. Will you help?” they would whisper into the phone like they were giving me a fatal diagnosis, “But you’re a Black woman.” And my response is, “I know.” But embedded in their warning to me was their holding of identity politics themselves, that despite knowing I was more qualified, more capable and eminently able to do the job, they saw my race and my gender as inherent disqualifiers that should mean that they had no allegiance and no loyalty to me. And it’s a deeply painful reality, because these are the people who had known and knew better than anyone else and they still walked away because they were concerned that my identity was somehow a disqualifier.
But on the day I became the nominee for our party, I became the nominee having disproven this and one of the clearest examples of contrast possible, because in our campaign we intentionally centred people of colour in marginalised communities. I proudly proclaimed myself an ally of the LGBTQ community. I talked about issues that were normally kept to the side, or certainly avoided altogether in the Deep South. Because I believe that people cannot vote for things that do not include them and they cannot be seen unless we speak them into existence. And so, with my Campaign Manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, who’s one of the most amazing architects of a political campaign I’ve ever seen, we ran an unprecedented campaign, one that went to all 159 counties, and this is a really big state. We went everywhere, but more importantly, we talked to everyone. We invested in every community, because the reality is, you can centre marginal identities without excluding anyone else. Because the thing about identity is that it tends to have cross-sectionality.
I am a woman of colour, but I also happen to inhabit, sometimes, a middleclass lifestyle. Therefore, when I talk about class issues, I can talk about them, but still be aware of the concerns faced by Black women who are constrained to be in the lower class. We can have conversations as a member of the dominant heterosexual community, I can talk about the needs of the LGBTQ community, because I know from my position of power that I can create space. I can talk about the need for civil rights for those who are non – who aren’t documented in the United States, because as a citizen, I have a privilege and I can use that privilege to create space for a conversation about the humanity of people, whether they are documented or not in the United States. And so, in our campaign we were intentional about these conversations and the worry was that by being intentional, by having these conversations, I would somehow diminish my electoral politics and diminish my capacity to attain victory. I did not become Governor, but this isn’t why, and I’ll get into that in a second.
What we realised in our campaign, what I realised, from the very beginning, is that people want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to know that their lived experiences are valued and recognised and that the barriers that they faced have the possibility of being eroded and moved away. They want to know that being a member of a community that is disabled does not mean that they are excluded from participation. That is why, in our campaign, we created opportunities for every single community to have a voice and to be seen and to be heard and to be invested in. Because that was the other demand that we had, it is insufficient to talk about a community if you’re not willing to put your resources into their uplift, and so, our campaign spent an unprecedented amount of money in every single community. We were the first campaign to run state wide Spanish language ads for Governor’s race. We were the first campaign to launch a bilingual canvas. We were the first campaign to convene Latino and Asian and LGBTQ and Black media to talk, not only about having them speak about our campaign, but also, investing in their resources, making sure they could tell our story, and it worked.
As Leslie pointed out, we tripled the number of Latinos who voted in the state of Georgia from 2014 to 2018. We tripled the number of Asian-Pacific islanders. We increased the use participation rate by 139%, and yes, we increased African-American participation from 700,000 to 1.2 million, but I want to put that in context. In 2014, 1.1 million Democrats voted in the gubernatorial election. In my election, 1.9 million Democrats, including 1.2 million Black people. That is a dramatic change and it did not come about because of my sunny disposition. It happened because we invested in these communities. We invested a commensurate amount. We’re the only campaign I know of that was on country music radio and urban radio at the exact same time, with the exact same message, because that’s the reality of identity politics. We had these conversations, but these conversations didn’t differ so dramatically from place-to-place.
I talked about education, the need for access, the need for wraparound services for making certain that children could learn because they weren’t hungry and tired and scared and homeless, or facing mental disorders. We talked about the need for access to healthcare across the state, including rural hospitals staying open and Black mothers not dying from maternal mortality rates that rival certain undeveloped countries. We talked about the need for economic security for entrepreneurs, especially micro entrepreneurs, to have the same access to opportunity, regardless of race and gender, and I had the same conversations, regardless of the community I spoke with. But because I can acknowledge the challenges facing each community, I was able to give specific responses and specific policy results that could change their lives. And in the end, not only did we increase the turnout rates among all of those communities of colour, those marginalised communities, I actually increased the White participation rate for Democrats for the first time in more than 25 years.
This is what happens when identity politics takes centre stage. All identities are recognised, all values are given opportunity, but the right values have to give primacy. The value that our Americanness, that our humanity, that our citizenship, should win out, that we are yoked together by our common experience, but that we have to recognise that those common experiences have different examples. I believe that identity politics makes us more resilient, because we start to understand that we are all here together. We may experience it differently, but we are not going anywhere. We have to recognise that it makes us stronger, because we are able to talk about who we are in the fulsome way that changes how we see each other and how we experience each other. And most importantly, it makes us vibrant, because difference is good, difference is viable and difference is transformative and for that reason, I argue in favour of identity politics now and forever. Thank you [applause].
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Thank you. That was wonderful. I’m going to start with the first question. Please prepare your questions. Keep them succinct and please say who you are, beyond – I mean, if you just want to say you’re a Chatham House Member that’s wonderful, but we’d love to hear more about your affiliation, if you’d like to share it with us. So, that was wonderful. This is a really hard topic.
Stacey Abrams
Yes.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
And this is tough stuff. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, in a time when it was wonderful to be, you know, an American and the American dream was about us all being American. It wasn’t really an era when we talked about being, certainly not in Nebraska, about being Asian-American or Latin-Amer – or anything. We were just American, and I think sitting here in London and in Europe, I first came to London in 1988 and watched a lot of debate about cosmopolitanism and all sorts of things, and in a move to try and do what people here thought America had done so well, which was to integrate Americans and to make us Americans, to make immigrants Americans. You’ll find people in the UK, who have lived here their entire life and don’t consider themselves British or English, and that’s not really the story of America.
So, the turn to identity politics is fraught. It’s clearly powerful and your story and your narrative, I think is tremendously meaningful, but it is very different from what a lot of the Europeans have historically admired about America. So, my question is, how is it that you – and I like that you turn – you made that turn in the end of your remarks to being American as well, how do you manage that balance? And there is, of course, the – there is the risk that that push for identity is captured by the right, it’s captured for the wrong reasons, it’s used to channel White nationalism, and all sorts of things. That didn’t seem to happen in the White turnout that you’re referring to in the 2018 campaign, but how do you manage that when you’re talking to the people in Georgia and when you’re, sort of, articulating your vision?
Stacey Abrams
So – and I think that’s an important question and I want to provide a little context. Nebraska, not the most diverse place in the world.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
No, but…
Stacey Abrams
But – no.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
…there are very diverse communities, very segregated, but very diverse communities.
Stacey Abrams
So, my point was going to be, diversity often leads to language. When you have a racially homogenous community, then race is rarely the language that’s used to describe identity difference. I grew up in the Deep South, where race is always a part of the way things are described. There has never been the time where that was not part of the narrative and so, part of the national conversation about identity is not that it’s a new conversation, it’s just a more frequent conversation because of the increasing demographic changes that we see across the country.
When communities of colour stopped being Black and just stopped being Black people, when it was Black and Latino and Asian-Pacific Islander, the language continued to evolve and so, part of it is this notion that identity politics is new. It’s not. It has been a constant part of the conversation since America’s inception. What’s different is, it’s being weaponised because it’s increasingly effective. What has happened is that communities that have to leverage their identity to demand change and redress have been able to do so more effectively, and I think the most current example is actually not one based on race, but one based on sexual orientation.
Marriage equality is a part of the argument about identity politics, because it has changed social norms and it’s been reinforced by legal imprimatur that says you can no longer discriminate, based on these issues. And when marriage equality came to fruition in the United States, the very next conversation that was weaponised was the bathroom. For transgender populations, they became proxy for why identity is a terrible thing, because now that you’ve acknowledged the humanity of the LGBTQ community and permitted their participation in a fundamental and sacred institution, we have to diminish them by saying that well, the – but that might be okay, but this community should not be permitted to have their identity acknowledged. And so, what’s incredible about the United States is that we’ve always been able to still be Americans in the midst of that.
The transgender community has been participating in the American Army and the American Armed Forces for decades, if not since its inception, just quietly. African-Americans have never shirked their response to the call. From the Revolutionary War onwards, even at a time of enslavement ,Blacks stood up and said, “We are American first.” And what we have to recognise is that identity politics does not diminish our creedal connection as Americans, but that our full participation is only created when our full identity is acknowledged and the barriers to those identities, being a part of being able to access policies, when those barriers are removed.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Okay, I have many questions, but I don’t think it’s fair for me to ask another one, so put your hands very, very high up, so we know who you are. I’m going to start with the lady in the front row.
Vinanda Mudani
Good afternoon.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
If you wait for the mic to come to you, ‘cause we are livestreaming, so we need to be able to – everybody needs to be able to hear you.
Vinanda Mudani
Good afternoon, my name’s Vinanda Mudani and I am a recent law graduate at Aston University and I’m also the Co-Founder of Talkabout, which is a youth platform where young people discuss current affairs. I was really interested in your story, because you appear very strong and I know being a woman in politics isn’t always easy and being a Black woman in politics is a different ballgame, and I wanted to ask you a question, based on an experience that I had. I was discussing Brexit on ITV on the day that the snap election was announced, and I remember going on Twitter after and somebody mentioned, “Why are you talking about British politics? You don’t even look British.” And in light of that I want to know how do you keep yourself going and what moves you in times where it’s not all roses and times where people are diminishing not just what you’re saying, but who you are as a person? So, what moves you? Thank you.
Stacey Abrams
And first of all, my humanity is not determined by anyone else, and I grew up in a community where there were often questions. I recently wrote a book called Minority Leader. It’s being released as a lead from the outside, but I recount a story where I won an essay contest as a fifth grader and my dad took me to go pick up the $50 cheque, which, at that point, seemed like I’d won the Lottery. And so, he’s sitting in the car and he tells me to just go in and grab it and get my award and so, I run inside and I’m still inside and he finally comes in to find out why I’m there and it’s because the woman in charge refuses to give me my award. She didn’t believe I was the student who won it and she said, “Well” – she was demanding ID. “I’m in fifth grade, I don’t have ID, but my name is Stacey Abrams,” and she refused to believe that I was the Author and she was quizzing me on what I’d written in my essay.
Now, she wasn’t the Judge, she was simply the person, the PTA member who was sitting at the table to give me the money, but she took it upon herself to question the validity of my identity because I didn’t fit her normative standard of who should be winning this award in Gulfport Mississippi. That’s fifth grade. I can give you a litany of stories, and what happens because of stories like that, either you become more inured to it or you bend into it and you become overwhelmed by it.
I’m fairly obstinate, so – and I was a good writer, so I knew it was mine and I wanted my money, and – but what that has led to is a stronger response from me, because the two things I understood, when my dad, who was very angry, took me home, he and my mom had a conversation with me and it wasn’t, you know, sort of, a sitcom conversation, it was, you know, “This is going to happen and you just – you need to know what to do and you did what you were supposed to do, which is you don’t let someone tell you who you are.” That has been my mantra ever since and so, one of the ways to respond to those who would question, as I say, question my capacity to run for Governor or to do anything else I want to do, is that you’re not going to tell me who I am. You can ask legitimate questions about where I stand, you can question how my policies may play out, but you do not get to identify and define my humanity for me. That’s on me and I stand in that.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Very good. Hands held very high. I’m going to go right to the back, the gentleman right there. No, just behind you.
Jack Baldan
Hiya, Jack Baldan, I work for Foresight News. In – you’re arguing about the importance of identity politics and obviously, we saw in Georgia the impact it can have. Looking to 2020, I’m sorry to ask, but how does that work if the eventual Democratic candidate is pale, male and stale?
Stacey Abrams
So, I mean, one of the pieces that I didn’t go into as much, but has been the core of how we’re attacking this, I’m not Governor, in part, because of voter suppression. Because the corollary to electoral politics being the point of access and redress for communities that face challenges because of identity is that the best way to stop them is to not let them vote. If you cannot vote to change the rules, you cannot force your inclusion in those rules and so, we’ve launched Fair Fight Action, which is the non-profit organisation that is fighting for electoral – for voting rights and electoral integrity in the state of Georgia.
My litmus test is not going to be a litmus test, based on race or gender for who should be the next nominee for the Democratic nomination. It’s going to be whether or not you talk about voter suppression, whether you have a response to, and an inclusion of identity as part of your intentionality. I certainly would like to see a woman win. I am an advocate of people of colour getting higher and higher positions, as, you know, that’s helpful to me, and to communities I – to communities at large. But I don’t think that it has to be a person of colour or a woman for change to happen, but it is faster when a person who has experienced that type of oppression gets access to power, because they are more likely to see the obvious avenues, but also, the less obvious obstacles and so, it is a good thing for more people of colour and more women to run.
The way I’ll wrap this up is that I will say that for me, in the state of Georgia, I’m going to work hard to make certain every person who wants to be President of the United States has to come to Georgia. I’m having lots of dinners, but we are spending a lot of time, every single person I meet with, we have to talk about voter suppression. Because if we do not create space for people to cast their ballots, then our democracy is in trouble and that is a danger to us all, regardless of identity.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Question right here, in this section, right at the back, right behind the woman on the floor with the camera. Yes, you, put your – if you put your hand up, they can bring you the mic, yes.
Member
I didn’t have a question.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I saw your hand up.
Member
No, no.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Gentleman right here and then we’ll come to this section. Gentleman right here.
Spencer Shia
I’m Spencer Shia, currently a first year undergrad at University College London and Miss Abrams, thank you for coming. You talk about creating an inclusive civic society that is compatible with identity politics, but that is only possible at the point of which the identity politics is inclusive. How could you ensure that by introducing identity politics that you will not have exclusive forms identity politics, like White nationalism, Christian fundamentalism and other, you know, exclusive forms take over and divide us, rather than creating a civic and inclusive society?
Stacey Abrams
Thank you. So, part of the premise is that identity politics have always existed, including exclusive politics. The Ku Klux Klan, the Know Nothing Party, these have been longstanding examples of that exclusivity. My argument is that by engaging and lifting up the more inclusive conversations, especially bringing people into our body politic, that those identities can overwhelm the effectiveness of those who seek exclusion.
Identity politics exists. My point is not that we’re creating something new out of whole cloth or that it’s a recent phenomenon. It is that identity politics have always existed. What’s causing the turmoil today is that it’s more effective, that when people are raising their identities, they’re actually able to create change. If you look at 2017 in Virginia, the dramatic takeover of the legislative process in Virginia happened because identities were put front and centre and the communities associated with those identities finally had agency. What we saw happen in the 2018 mid-term elections, was that identity was raised and was used as a way to galvanise and engage more people in the body politic. Exclusivity only works to a certain point, because your exclusion, if it becomes – for a long time, exclusion worked because the majority of the dominant possi – the dominant identity was able to, not only exclude, but to silence.
What has happened, in recent years, and it’s on an accelerated timetable, is that those who’ve been excluded suddenly have agency, but there are also more of them. There are more of us and that’s going to force inclusion to be a more natural reaction than exclusivity when identity politics is at play.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
I mean, one thing I liked, in reading about this in your campaign strategy, was that you took these things and you made them very concrete. So, it wasn’t identity, it was maternal mortality rates amongst African-American voters in rural areas. So, you took that healthcare issue and you really did, you gave it very concrete expression.
Stacey Abrams
Absolutely.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
So, I found that very interesting. Gentleman right here has been very patiently waiting.
Ronan Tynan
Ronan Tynan, Filmmaker and Co-Founder of Esperanza Productions and Member of Chatham House. First of all, I must thank you for speaking so refreshingly positively and enthusiastically about identity politics, because I’m Irish and I think we recognised identity politics before the term was invented. And indeed, I can honestly say to you, when I go to the United States, which I do very frequently, because we’re a big family in the United States, including one of my daughters, who’s there now as well…
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
There are so many people that want to talk.
Ronan Tynan
Oh, yeah, sorry for going on too long about that, Madam Chairman, but it’s just this point about voter suppression. You didn’t actually mention figures about voter suppression, which I was suppressed at…
Stacey Abrams
Oh.
Ronan Tynan
…because I keep hearing this term, but what does it mean, significantly? And since you will be President some day of the United States, I must ask you this foreign policy question, very, very briefly, Madam Chairperson, is some friends on the left of the Democratic party do shock me sometimes when they support – this is the question: why do some Democrats on the left, like Tulsi Gabbard, for example, appear to do PR for the Assad regime, even be photographed with Assad because the US appears to be enthusiastic about regime change, even though it does nothing about it?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Thank you.
Ronan Tynan
So, why do people on the left of the Democratic Party support these brutal dictators just because it appears the US is interested in regime change, when it doesn’t know anything about it?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Thank you.
Ronan Tynan
If you could talk about, that would be very good.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Thank you, the end of the question. Thank you very much, that was great. You’ve got…
Stacey Abrams
So, I did not talk about voter suppression in writ large because I assumed someone would ask. So, here it is, 2018 – so, between 2010/2018 Brian Kemp, who was my opponent in the race, served as Secretary of State. And during his tenure he purged 1.5 million voters from the roll, he held captive in 2018, 53,000 voters who’d registered to vote, but were not processed because of a term called ‘exact-match’, which is a policy that we’d actually sued him about. He lost the lawsuit. He agreed never to do it again and then he got the legislature to pass a law saying he had to do it and 90% of the people captured by exact-match are people of colour, 70% were African-American. He oversaw an electoral system that shutdown 200 precincts out of 3,000 in the state of Georgia, largely in low income communities and rural communities, so it made it harder for people to cast their votes. He oversaw an election scheme that not only blocked registration, but also blocked valid access. People who applied for absentee ballots, did not receive them. People who tried to go and vote, were not given the opportunity to vote because they were unlawfully purged. We know that there were ballots that were not counted because of what’s called signature match, where you have to sign the back of your absentee ballot and if your signature does not match what was on record, you were not allowed to vote. My signature does not match when I go from the grocery store to the Pharmacist and yet, that was used to deny people the right the vote and so, we know that tens of thousands of people were denied the right to vote in the state of Georgia. At least 50,000 called us in the ten-day period between Election Day and the end of the process, when I did my non-concession speech. Voter suppression is real. Voter suppression is insidious, but it’s also seamless, because, typically, what happens is that we are taught to believe that a person can’t vote because they made a mistake, as opposed to the fact that the system is designed to deny them agency and access.
So, whether it’s registration, accessing the ballot or having your ballot counted, including the fact in Georgia, African-Americans had a four-hour wait time, the longest wait time for African-Americans in the country, including in precincts where they under-resourced with two or three machines, knowing, based on 20 days of early voting, that there was going to be a dense population of people who were voting, that people who did – could not plug in the machines. And we had an extraordinary number, inclu – entire – including entire communities that were given provisional ballots that are not required to be counted and so, you look at any single instance of voter suppression, it is bad. What happened in Georgia was that they tied together an entire system and systematically denied the right to vote, in a way we believe was violative of the 15th Amendment, the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment, the right to – the Voting Rights Act, HAVA and, basically, humanity, so there’s that.
And then the last thing, a regime change, I do – I cannot speak for any of the folks. I will tell you that my position is that you should be in charge. I’m deeply concerned that anyone would foment brutal oppression, but when I become President, I’ll be able to do something about it.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Right at the very back, woman right at the very back.
Anita Punwani
Thank you. Anita Punwani, Risk Advisor. Your story about where your father came to your support obviously was pivotal for you and a turning point. To what extent should we turn to the next generation, through schooling, to change their mindset, rather than the current generation, who, perhaps, are fixed in their thinking?
Stacey Abrams
I believe that we should always assume growth is possible, but you work aggressively to shape behaviours early and so, I don’t dismiss or abandon any community. The number of people I met during my tenure in the legislator who did not see me as part of their vision of the future, who came to my aid or who at least mollified their opposition, means that you can’t dismiss a single community. And I think that goes back to the original part of the question, our common citizenship, our common allegiance, is what connects us. Identity politics is about making sure as many people get to be a part of that fully as possible and so, whether you’re in Nebraska or Mississippi or Georgia, our common opportunity is to consistently use our Americanness for our purposes, to use it as the ground game. We come together because we want our country to be better. The issue is, how do we make certain as many people as possible get to fully participate in that? And that conversation tends to cut through a lot of the challenges and differences, but what happens is that it becomes brittle if people hear you talk about it, but they never see it actualised. And so, I think the opportunity in the UK and around the country – around the world is to actualise those conversations with the current generation, but do not exempt those of older generations of their responsibility for making it so.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Okay, hands held high. I think I feel like we haven’t gotten – okay, right here in the second row and then woman over here, a gentleman here, we’ll come here. I think I might take two, or three, if that’s okay, in this round.
Talu
Hi, I’m Talu, I’m a student of politics and international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, bit of a mouthful. But back on voter suppression, so, obviously as a Brit, in the UK, it seems almost inconceivable that it would be legal or viable on any level, state or federal, for somebody, so taking Brian Kemp specifically, for example, to be Secretary of State and to oversee his own, sort of, gubernatorial election. And proves – just to rush on, but being in the UK, where your Council will send you multiple letters inviting you to check that your entire household is registered, what do you see as the solution to, sort of, overcome the capacity of individual states to manoeuvre however they like? Is it a new Federal Voting Rights Act, so what would you suggest?
Stacey Abrams
I think, one, it’s the restoration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, only it should have universal application and not be limited to those purveyors of past bad action, because the United States has changed since the 1960s and we have new states that are also bad actors. Number two, we have to have, I believe, federal legislation that sets a floor for access to the right to vote. Right now different states have incredibly variable decisions. In November of 18 in Florida, 1. – I think it’s 1.8 million former convicted felons were restored to the right to vote, but that’s not true in every single state. Your citizenship and your right to vote should not differ, based on the lines of each state. We are United States, which means there should be a common set of standards that determine access to the right to vote and I think those standards should begin and end with being citizens of the United States.
I think you can have local administration of how those rights are expressed, because there is going to be a difference, based on the density of a population, access to technology, those different things, but there should be a baseline for what constitutes access to democracy. H.R.1 is the bill that was introduced in the first day of the legislative session, starting in 18 and – or starting in 19 and I believe H.R.1 is an important first step to creating a federal conversation about setting a floor for citizenship. We can always get better, but we should never get worse.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Okay, I’m going to take two questions from over here, the woman in the second row?
Huda
Hi, my name is Huda. I’m a masters student at UCL as well, in political science. So, I think we’ve, kind of, touched on bringing, you know, bringing people along and getting them to buy into identity politics, but I was wondering specifically about people who would consider themselves liberals, but don’t want to buy into the idea of identity politics. I mean, Francis Fukuyama, perhaps one. I was wondering what you would, like, say about, kind of, getting those people to, kind of, like, leave behind idealistic normative liberalism and, kind of, accept that identity experiences are real and need to be taken into consideration?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Hold that thought, and the woman right at the back of this section and right, yes, you.
Rachel Owen
Hello, my name’s Rachel Owen. I’m also a Spelman alum and so is my sister over here at the front. I’m also a member of the Aleto Foundation, an organisation that develops young leaders and I’m also a Diversity Advisor at Business in the Community.
Stacey Abrams
Do you sleep?
Rachel Owen
And – pardon?
Stacey Abrams
I said do you sleep? That’s a lot.
Rachel Owen
I try to. I try to. So, race looks very different in the UK and we don’t have a President that’s building a wall or anything like that, but we have so many other issues and race here is more insidious and from my work, our research shows that people from all ethnicities do not like talking about race and I believe that America that is one thing that you do well. And I just wanted to ask, what do you think that we can do here to open that conversation around race, because if we don’t talk about it, nothing’s going to be done? So, that’s my question.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Okay, is it okay, I’m going to take one more?
Stacey Abrams
Hmmm hmm.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
And then right at the very back in the corner, the gentleman had a question.
John Prideaux
Hi, I’m John Prideaux. I’m the US Editor of The Economist. Thank you for doing this. Thanks, Leslie. I agree with much of what you said, particularly about the voting laws in America, which are clearly nuts. But I have one question, which is, you didn’t talk much about what happens in politics when identities clash and on the progressive side, even within the progressive side, identities often clash. So, you mentioned bathroom bills in passing. You know, there’s a big fight in America between trans people and feminist women over that issue and it seems to me that if your political disagreement is rooted too much in identity, then that’s a bit of a dead end, ‘cause if you and I disagree on something and we both say we’re disagreeing because of our identity, there’s, frankly, nowhere for us to go. You can’t persuade me, I can’t persuade you, because neither of us can change our identity and at that point you need to appeal to a bigger story, which I think was something that Leslie was talking about at the beginning. So, I was wondering if you could say something on that and about the difference between, kind of, good identity politics and bad identity politics.
Stacey Abrams
Sure. Okay, starting with you, the universality of identity, and I think these tie together, but I’m going to do them separately. I don’t think Fukuyama intends to denigrate identity, but I think he has a very facile grasp of how it plays out in the real lives of those for whom identity is directly connected to their class access, to their access to almost every other facet of public policy. And it is a com – it is more comfortable to use a macro term like class, because then your enemy is very clearly the, you know, sort of, caricatured fat cat capitalist who doesn’t want you to be successful. It’s much harder when your opponent is a White working class person who thinks that you shouldn’t get a promotion because they refuse to believe that your identity was not the reason for your advancement. Or if you are straight and you believe that your identity is somehow diminished by the elevation of someone who’s a member of the LGBTQ community. It’s in those narrower spaces that we, and this goes to your question a bit, it’s in those narrower spaces that we have the hardest time talking about identity, but that is where identity has the most relevance. Because we don’t all exist in this normative macro space, where it is only about class and when we refuse to acknowledge that, then people know when they’re not being seen, they know when they’re not being heard and the solution is not to always fight. Sometimes the solution is to lapse into a silence that’s actually more corrosive and more dangerous, because that creates a despondency and a disconnection that often turns into disaffection and that disaffection is very dangerous.
And so, my belief is that it is absolutely necessary for us to push the conversation of identity, not as an end of itself, but as a way to articulate the need for our public policy to be more inclusive and to create more space. That’s why I always take those conversations and turn it back into a real policy issue, because if I want a White working class man in South Georgia, who lives on a farm, to believe that he should care about Police brutality that disproportionately affects Black men, then we have to have a conversation about why his life is made less safe when the Police are not held to account. Because when he faces someone storming onto his property, because they have a no-knock warrant, that’s a problem for him. And so, we have to be able to connect these conversations and that means it’s incumbent upon leaders, and particularly political leaders, to be more detailed and intentional about their leadership. It is easiest to win an election when you talk about all the great things that will happen and whose fault it is, the bad things happen. It is harder to win an election and even harder to govern when you have to actually acknowledge all of the substrates of issues, but I think you create a more resilient population when people feel that they are included, ‘cause they may not always win, but at least they know that they’re part of the debate.
To the question about race. We talk about race in the United States, we do not do it well. I want to be very clear. We talk about it a lot, especially in the South, but our challenge is, that it’s often a superficial conversation that rarely then turns into action. But when it does, it is incredibly powerful. When we talk about race, I mean, one of the reasons I talk about the Indian Civil Rights Movement is that Native Americans were excluded from participation in the right to vote in the United States until the 20th Century and they still faced – in 2018, in North Dakota, they were told that even though they live on reservations without residential addresses and the courts acknowledged their lack of access, they were told they were denied the right to vote, unless in six weeks, they could find a way to get a residential address, that they could not create for themselves. That continues to be a moment where we use their identities against them and their race against them and that happens so often, but it’s often cloaked beneath this notion that we talk about race better than others. We acknowledge it because there are a whole lot of us, but we all, as, I would say Western society, has to do a deeper and better job of, not only talking about race, but talking about how race changes our engagement, our expectations and our realities and so, I would say America does that better than some, but we are certainly not good at it yet.
When identities clash. I think that that is the nature of democracy that, yes, our identities are going to clash. The problem has been that we have avoided the clash by just denying agency to anyone and when you deny agency as a way to avoid confrontation, then you diminish participation and you – that then leads, again, to the disaffection I was talking about. I do know that there are going to be moments where there is a clash, but often, the question becomes does that clash benefit more people or not, and how real is that clash, when played out writ large? The – and just to use a very – you know, to use the transgender bathroom example again, when that happened in North Carolina, they lost hundreds of millions of dollars in economic access.
The easy solution is what we’ve seen in a lot of spaces, for those who have normative gender standards, you have bathroom one, bathroom two, and then you have a transgender bathroom. They’re economic solutions that may be uncomfortable or more expensive, but they actually can help resolve those deeper concerns, but the nature of society is the nature of figuring out, when identities clash, how do you provide the greatest access to the greatest number of people? No-one is ever going to be perfectly satisfied and no-one’s identities are ever going to be fully met and fully acknowledged, but identity politics demands that we have the conversation and that’s the progress I’m looking for, because without the conversation, we end up, again, with this disaffection, this distance and, I believe, an erosion of our democracy that is dangerous to everyone involved.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Okay and we have time for two very succinct questions. So, the…
Stacey Abrams
He’s one, the pink ones, yes.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
…the gentleman here and the woman here and I think, yeah, then we need to…
Dylan Kwande
Thank you so much.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
And one more there, but very succinct.
Dylan Kwande
Thank you so much, Stacey, for such an insightful talk. My – so, my name is Dylan Kwande, I’m an incoming Lawyer at Cambridge University and a Member of the Aleto Foundation. Touching on what the last member of the audience asked, I want to ask you whether you think there’s an ascendant orthodoxy on the political left in the US that is weaponizing identity politics to breed competitive victimhood and tribalism in a way that contradicts, say, Martin Luther King’s words, which was that I – the concept of people – that people should be judged by the content of their character, as opposed to the colour of their skin, or whatever diversity – strand of diversity you want to use?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
And just here.
Susan Schoenfeld Harrington
Hi, I’m Susan Schoenfeld Harrington, I’m an active Democrat here and also a Member of the Chatham House Board in the US, actually. So, my question for you is, I have not heard anyone argue for identity politics as succinctly and as movingly as you just did and it’s really true. And I – and given the fact that you were chosen by the party to do the response to the State of the Union and for a change, the press seemed to be really positive about this, my question is, you’re talking about Presidency, I know people are talking to you about the Senate, there are a lot of candidates, how would you talk about these issues to de-weaponize them if you were, you know, dealing with – I mean, a Trump is something just generally? We need that kind of advice, but also, maybe, who knows, maybe they’ll ask you to step in and have…
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
And the woman right here, with her hand held high, and this will be the last one.
Ali Wass
Thank you so much. My name’s Ali Wass and I’m a graduate student at Cambridge University and this past cycle I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. My question was to do a little bit more with political campaigning and identity politics. So, in an era where technology makes it more and more possible to strategically micro target certain groups, and we’ve seen this, kind of, cynically exploited by some bad political actors, how do we address that, especially with regarding – with regard to social media platforms, which have also been a huge force for good in advancing the cause of equality?
Stacey Abrams
Okay, starting with the MLK quote, that is often taken out of context, not only in the context of the speech, but in the context of his entire body of work. Martin Luther King never denied that race played a very substantial part in how people are seen. What he argued was that it should not deny you humanity and that the laws that were organised to use race as an exclusionary tactic were wrong and so, the call for content of our character was designed to say that our aspirational goals should be that we no longer use identity writ large to exclude people from participation, race being the strongest one that he was using. Although, if you look at his later work around class, he looked at race and class both as being consonant in how people were being excluded. But the notion that he thought that there would someday be a day where race did not exist was never what he argued. What he argued were it should never be used to determine your value, and identity politics is not a value statement. It is a statement that says that you have to acknowledge the barriers to my full inclusion in our society because of my identity and that there are compromises that are going to be required of all of us for a larger inclusion.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is one that I think of, in part, because it has changed the way all of us operate, because we had to change that in order to allow a larger group of people to actually participate fully in our democracy. The fact that in the United States certain states, when you hit a number, a certain number of people, the law now requires that you print ballots in that language, says that even with your Americanness, your language barrier is the legitimate one that has to be acknowledged for your full inclusion in our democracy. And so, I would argue that it’s not tribalism, unless it is designed to say that we want to exist separate from. The point of identity politics is we want to be included in, but that our inclusion in requires that we have policies that acknowledge what’s separating us, as we speak and that’s what I’m pushing for.
I very much believe that – and I adopt the language of identity politics, and this is to move into your question, I adopt the language of identity politics because it’s the most succinct articulation of the debate that’s raging, but it’s important for us to remember that it is not a new debate. This is not a new circumstance. It has been embedded in our humanity, regardless of civilisation, and we find something to dislike about the other side, always. We find ways to give primacy to our communities and we often believe our primacy requires the diminution of others. That is the human condition. What democracy demands is that we move beyond that to try to make as many people a part of it as – a part of our opportunity as possible and so, what I ask of every Presidential candidate I meet with, you have to talk about voter suppression, because electoral politics is the most direct means in the United States of expressing your beliefs and your values and your needs, but that we also have to talk about policy issues that matter. We may not always agree on the solutions, but if we can’t articulate what the problems are, we will never find the solutions. And so, regardless of what I stand for next, in terms of my electoral politics, my responsibility as an American is to demand a constant conversation about these issues, because that’s the only way more of us get to be – to benefit and get to participate.
Technology makes that hard, because what technol – technology is, ultimately, one of the most democratic tools and that means it can be misappropriated and can be used for harm. But that goes back to, I think, one of my earlier comments, which is that we have to overwhelm with, I mean, basically, overwhelm bad with good. You can never stop bad from being so. I mean, if you’ve seen the play, Hamilton, you know that even then people were weaponizing communications to send out terrible stories about one another and it was a fairly effective way to harm the other side. We just make it faster, easier and nastier with technology. But micro targeting, when it’s done to say I see you is a good. When it’s done to say I see you and you don’t matter, it’s a bad. When it’s done to provide antidemocratic information or to diminish a person’s sense of humanity, it is wrong and we need to stop it, and when it’s used to just spread disinformation at large, it’s problematic. And so, I do think we should be moving towards a more aggressive monitoring of how information is shared, because when, again, when technology is weaponised to diminish access and inclusion, that’s problematic. Because as I tie all these together, I believe in democracy, I believe in an active engagement of society, where as many people as possible are allowed to participate in opportunity and to gain agency and to live their best lives. That happens when the barriers to their inclusion are diminished and when their opportunities for inclusion are increased.
Right now the language to describe that has been bastardised as identity politics, and my argument is that since that language carries today, because, you know, those who like those words are really good at spreading them, then we have to co-opt them and conscript them and change them into a way to articulate a set of principles and ideas that can make our country better and by that, make the world better. Thank you for having me.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Thank you [applause]. Thank you [applause].
