Transcript: Stacey Abrams: “Everyone Needs To Be Concerned”

Stacey Abrams says that the erosion of democracy and Black power in the South won’t just stop there.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 2 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. We have a really great guest who’s going to join us—it’s Stacey Abrams. I’m sure people who are tuned in or listening know she was a state representative in Georgia. She had two great campaigns for governor. She played a big role in Georgia turning blue, and she’s really worked on voting rights and a lot of other important issues, both in the South and around the country. So Stacey, welcome.

Stacey Abrams: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So I want to talk about the work you’re doing now. You’re helping run a group called American Pride Rises, and part of what it’s doing is defending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And you’ve written a lot about how DEI is essential to democracy—which I think a lot of people don’t think of as connected ideas. So explain to people why defending DEI is important as we try to fight for and defend democracy right now.

Abrams: Thank you so much, Perry. For me, it’s all of a piece. I’ve been working on voting rights for decades. I started with a table at Spelman College as a freshman—was the loneliest 17-year-old in college because nobody stopped at my table.

And I’ve always understood that democracy is organized around who needs what and who has a voice in making it possible. And in the United States, the communities that have been the most isolated from power, the most isolated from opportunity, have been vulnerable communities—people of color, women, religious minorities, basically anyone who is considered on the margins.

And in a nation that was predominantly white and mostly male with power, everything we’ve done since the founding of this country has been about how we share more and more of that power. That’s what democracy is—it’s about shared power.

And in the United States, because we like acronyms and because we like to be efficient, we have lumped all of the communities that have had to fight for their share of that power under the umbrella of DEI. The way I tell people to think about it is: diversity means all people, equity means fair access to opportunity, and inclusion means respect for belonging.

Whether we’re talking about a Revolutionary War fought so that, in part, white men who did not own land had the same rights as the landed gentry, or we’re talking about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to guarantee African Americans access to citizenship and the perquisites thereof, the 19th Amendment which allowed women the right to vote—actually white women, until we got the Voting Rights Act, which gave Black women equal power—whether we’re talking about Native Americans getting citizenship in 1924, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Title I which expanded public education to actually include rural children and children of color and poor kids, or the Respect for Marriage Act less than a decade ago—these are all DEI.

DEI isn’t just about Black kids going to Harvard. It is about any law or rule or regulation or policy change in the United States that created corrective action to allow more people to share power. And if democracy is about how we have shared power, then DEI is how we guarantee that shared power includes all who are eligible in the United States. That’s why DEI is in the DNA of democracy.

Bacon: You said DEI doesn’t just mean Black kids go to Harvard. And it also doesn’t mean—it’s become this thing where DEI means you had a training at your workplace and you didn’t like it. And you and I are probably for certain kinds of training, but it’s much deeper than that. How do we get people to think about DEI the way you said it, as opposed to the way the right—and we’ll come back to the center-left—has defined it?

Abrams: I would actually say that the right has properly defined DEI, and we know that because if you read Project 2025, it is one of the most oft-cited issues that they attack, and they mean for it to cover the waterfront.

For example, they understand that DEI includes the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that’s why, under this regime, when they eliminated federal compliance with DEI, one of the first actions taken was that the Department of Energy ceased to enforce Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act. What that means is that buildings built in the United States that have to get a seal of approval from the Department of Energy no longer have to comply with sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The right has long understood that DEI is the body of law and the body of regulation that allows everyone to participate. But they also recognize that the left has largely been embarrassed by the necessity, and therefore they lean into the tendency to demonize our language. And what happens on the side of those who know what we need—we become so chagrined that we spend our time apologizing for it or trying to change the language to accommodate their distaste, as opposed to recognizing they’re going after it for a reason.

And so the work that we do at American Pride Rises is to expand people’s understanding of what everyday DEI looks like. DEI meant that when veterans in the United States, after this administration took power—again, another example of what they did when they slashed DEI—a lot of vets lost their small business loans, because many veterans in the United States were covered under DEI protections. They got access to funding. They got access to education.

It was necessary because that was a population that was being underserved. They got special access, corrective access, expanded access—and all of those things can be separate but interchangeable. And in the process, they became part of DEI. So when the right, in this regime, canceled DEI protections, they canceled them for people who put their lives on the line, who are disabled because they were in U.S. service. And that was........

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