It is our tradition at the CFC to write love letters to comrades and friends-in-struggle. Stacey Abrams is certainly that. And because she is a Southern Black girl and the CFC began as a Southern (ATL-based) feminist project, we thought it befitting to send some CRUNK love her way.

 

Dear Stacey,

Two years ago I sat in a middle school gym with my son waiting for the launch of your campaign. I told my then ten year old son “this is epic” and of course he wanted to know how long epic was going to take. I explained who you were and why this moment mattered and that it was important to be in this room right now.

You have been my sister president along with Dr. Johnetta B Cole for more than twenty years. I remember being at a mandatory freshman convocation at Spelman when you explained the importance of sisters to speaking amongst themselves (in a pretty hostile room) about making our campus a safe space for lesbian and bisexual students to thrive. I was changed that evening because I watched you demonstrate true leadership.

I explained that your route as a elected official was not the usual one taken by a black politician in Atlanta and how it felt to see your signs in the North Druid Hills community on my way to Emory for classes.

I told him that you had a shot at winning because you talk to and listen to everyone like they are the only person that matters… “It’s her superpower,” I explained.

So when you came to the stage and told us the story about your father giving away his coat to a stranger while walking home in a rainstorm because he knew his family was coming for him and then told the room, “Georgia, I’m coming for you,” I believed you meant it. You proceeded to do exactly what you said and come for all of us.

I’m a skeptic because I believe that white supremacist heteropatriarchy functions to maintain itself. I know that “states rights” doesn’t mean the same thing if a brilliant skilled progressive black woman takes up residency at the governor’s mansion. But I always felt that if the black, working class, and poor in the urban places got with the ones in the rural places Georgia would be brand new. There has never been an occasion to prove this theory until your campaign.

You put Atlanta in dialogue with Georgia and put a spotlight on rural issues in ways that made everyone take notice of who we are as a full state and for that I am grateful. This is what had the “traditionalists” shaking in their boots and needing to change the playing field throughout the game.

You are my sister O sister, my true leader, because you pulled a state, a region, a nation out of their recliners and into the streets to register and speak on behalf of you and your campaign. You gave us a voice of hope and promise of full participation, a civics lesson, and a fierce and witty leader to get behind. Your campaign just gave us a new generation of leaders who won’t stand for cheating or dishonesty as business as usual in Georgia or the south.

You loved us enough to fight for our freedom. My son knows your name. He counts you as the true winner.

We didn’t lose…we won!

With you fighting alongside all those whom you mobilized, soon the bigger historic victories will be ours. Thanks for coming to get us!

With All My Love,

A Georgia Girl (and her son)

 

 

Dear Stacey,

Thank you for fighting for us.

Thank you for not conceding.

Thank you for always bringing the facts.

Thank you for being unwavering in your truth.

Thank you for calling out voting suppression.

Thank you for knowing they were lying all along.

Thank you for playing the long game and pushing Georgia forward.

Thank you for the fly and very enviable twist out.

Thank you for your quiet strength and bold determination.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yours truly,

Susana

P.S. I’m not taking my “Stacey Abrams for Governor” bumper sticker off my car until you run for something else.

 

Dear Stacey,

Our social movements often search high and low for a charismatic (male) leader. Seeking a nebulous notion of legitimacy or gravitas to help them engage the masses they wish to reach and engage. This is an age-old trope — an exhausted but resilient trope. Feminists, Black women, immigrants, women of color, queer, trans and non-binary folks — we are all excluded from this role by virtue of not fitting into the mold we find before us. I have been deeply uncomfortable as others gave in to this crisis of imagination of who our leaders could be. A crisis fomented by social and political institutions that seem like runaway trains — too fast, and too dangerous to control.

In your campaign, in your leadership, in your vision for change, I see a sparkling challenge to the old story of leadership.

These past years, I have often found myself in despair that our system of citizenship is this kind of runaway train. Too fast, too powerfully and historically corrupt to ever change. Your voice and your campaign pulled me from that despair.

Before you, I found myself beginning to believe that the project of electoral justice was irreparably lost to us — that we may be able to derail the train on occasion, but not to drive it.

Before you, I thought politics and integrity were wholly incompatible.

Then.

Then I watched you from Texas – another place where voter disenfranchisement is mixed into the air and earth of our own political landscape. And for the first time in a long while, I rooted my feet, took a deep breath, and noticed my own hope, emerging anew.

As a queer woman of color, who is both the proud daughter of immigrants and an immigrant herself, I watched as you were repeatedly pushed to defend your acceptance of immigrants as vital members of your state and this country. I saw you offered chance after chance to devolve into “us and them” narratives – and refuse, each time.

These days, hope is a historical project and an act of defiance.

Watching you lead, fight, and not concede, moved me from despair. Watching you name, assert, and reckon with institutional racism and sexism moved me into hope. Watching you claim and forge your work in the coming weeks and months, gave me not merely less despair, and new hope, but also energy and inspiration. Your speech of non-concession moved me to tears and cheers.

Thank you for modeling how to run for public office with clarity and integrity.

Thank you for showing us the way forth by building, and sometimes re-building, the road ahead.

Thank you for your strategy and your vision.

 

With gratitude, respect and admiration,

Eesha

 

i am a daughter of the south

 

raised by my mother to look both ways before crossing

 

arms and legs shoulders and hands

 

careful

 

because the world is not safe

 

for blackgirls in the south

 

where white  supremacy reigns supreme

 

and fairness is often lost

 

like hard fought campaigns

 

i was devastated for two tuesdays

 

watching the favor fall in the wrong hands

 

shrugging my shoulders

 

wrapping my arms around my legs and squeezing my hands to keep from crying

 

i was traveling the first day

 

from the south to the west coast

 

losing time and hope and faith

 

but on the eleventh day your furious calm

 

and patient waiting

 

made both ways possible. . .again

 

for a blackgirl in south

 

your justice leaning

 

leadership

 

beautiful wide smile

 

and kept promise to keep fighting

 

for us, for just us (justice)

 

suggests that better days are ahead

 

and behind us

 

as a blackgirl watching a blackgirl

 

out in the open and in public

 

passionately and purposefully

 

demonstrating badassery

 

you will always have my vote, my voice and my support

 

my shoulders, my hands, and my feet

 

your sacrifice and fierce love for us

 

does not go unnoticed

 

and will not return to you void

 

with gratitude and in southern blackgirl solidarity,

 

-R.

 

Dear Stacey,

I can vividly remember being in elementary school and having a conversation with my mother about bullying. I grew up in Brooklyn in the 90s and schoolyard fights were as common as the ice cream truck so, this was a lesson on survival. She said, “you have to stand up to a bully. It is not an option.” She also said, “9 times out of 10 bullies don’t actually want to fight. They pick on people that they don’t think will fight back.” Her theory was that most of the time, the very act of standing up to a bully is enough to make them stop. Sometimes you will have to actually fight. And sometimes you will lose. But the victory is not always in the win. It is in the willingness to stand up to someone that you’re supposed to be to afraid to fight. And your willingness to fight sends a message to everyone–you are not the one!

Your fight for the governorship and for our democracy made me think a lot about bullying and a lot about victory. While my mother was talking about physically fighting, you stood up for all of us who are being oppressed. You set the blueprint for how we should stand up and fight back to these bullies running our country. No more conceding to stolen elections for “the good of the country/state/municipality.” What good does that do? And for whom? We have seen what fighting looks like, so we must fight. And they must know that we will fight. Even if we lose.

Sometimes bullies win. But, the interesting thing about standing up to bullies is that there are other people who are rooting for the bullied. For they too have been victimized and see you as representing all of them. So, they celebrate every single blow that bully happens to land. Keep fighting Stacey. We are still rooting for you!

 

With love,

Chanel

Dear Stacey,

 

So many times over the course of your campaign, I have looked at your gorgeous, thick, brown-skinned, twist-out rockin’ self, and felt like I was seeing a doppelganger. We could be cousins. Given these twisty American roots and routes, and my being a Black girl from the Deep South, too, I like to imagine that we are. I got to see you speak a few weeks before the election, and I was riveted by what you had to say. But mostly, I wanted to ask you about your outfit. (Seriously, girl. Who is your stylist?) Anyway, I didn’t have the nerve, and more than that, you were there about your business. I never stand in the way of a Black woman about her business. Especially when her business is fighting for us.

I am grateful for you, Stacey. I know I am not alone in this feeling. Millions of Black girls, Black folk, progressive-minded folks of all races and stripes, are proud of you, thankful for you.  Thank you, Black Girl, for standing up and demanding that each and every one us be counted. You are the perfect mashup of Anna Julia Cooper who said,  “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without suing, or special patronage, then and there are the whole race enters with me,” and Andre 3000 who reminded us, “The South got something to say.” 

In each and every place you entered, you brought us with you, our names, our voices, our stories. And what you said was, “The South is the future. Don’t believe us? Just watch.” 

Thank you for your beautiful, brilliant, bold, Black Girl Brain. Thank you for showing the world what serious, chess-not-checkers, political thought and strategy looks like. If we have any hope of winning the long game, it will be because of minds like yours.

Thank you for slaying the hell out of that non-concession speech. Thank you for not giving in. Or backing up. Thank you for being unmoved by the chicanery and shenanigans of the other side. In this moment, where truth is so frequently treated as inconvenient, and therefore, dispensable, your choice to stand for truth and right is the moral compass we all need. Thank you for your eloquent rage.

I have found myself hoping in these weeks since Election Day that you are sleeping well, eating good, getting loved on, sipping coffee, tea, and bourbon till your heart’s content, and binge-watching everything. I hope that you feel fortified for the fight. I hope you know that the ancestors are proud of you, that those of who are here now are proud of you, and that those who are to come will be so glad for how you have walked your talk.

Keep pressing Black Girl. But make sure you rest some, too. And in the meanwhile, we got your back/like chiropractic.

 

With endless gratitude,

 

Brittney

 

P.S. Sue the hell out of their asses. We’re rooting for you.