Former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams sat down with The Root to reflect on her 2018 campaign for the governor’s mansion in Georgia and whether or not the country is ready for a black woman to be president. She also discussed the media’s treatment of her during her run for governor and some of the racist opposition ads that portrayed her as King Kong.
Abrams doesn’t think the media was necessarily racist towards her but believes the press corps lacked nuance in their reporting about her candidacy and what it meant.
“I would attribute it less to racism and more to a very narrow and immature ability to navigate the story of my campaign,” said Abrams, who founded voting-rights advocacy group Fair Fight Action in 2017. “I was doing a number of things that were new and different and discomforting to some. But what was worse was that, for a lot of those folks, they could not comprehend how all of these things could be true at the exact same moment. I wouldn’t necessarily ascribe any racial animus as much as I would a lack of—there was some incompetence in the coverage that was problematic.”
As for her political future, Abrams said she’ll make up her mind on a possible U.S. Senate run in the next few weeks and that the decision on whether to run for president or not has a longer time table.
“I do not believe that there is the type of urgency that some seem to believe there is,” she said when asked about a presidential run.
On the subject of reparations, Abrams is unquestionably supportive for them.
“I believe that African Americans and Native Americans are entitled to reparations,” she said. “We are the two communities who were legally disenfranchised from the inception of this country and we are the two communities who had legal structures that were put in place for such a long period of time that our ability to achieve and access opportunity at a level that was commensurate with the rest of America was just not available.”
DISCUSSION
I saw her on Colbert a week or two ago and was amazed how much sense she made (VS your average politician on a talk show speaking your various talking points). I mean, she’s not as smart as our current stable genius in the White House (who is, honestly, I mean, his uncle was a professor at Harvard!), but she certainly makes so many in Congress seem like idiots. I could see in that five minutes why the republicans were so scared they had to suppress votes and rig the election for their guy, and still it was close.
Add in Pete Buttigieg and AOC (two name two others I’ve heard speak and was impressed with) the young people in the party seem to have this thing in good hands. Now if the old folks would stop acting scared of them and let them lead.
The republicans are frightened by what they see and why they call them (esp AOC and Omar) so much.