 Good afternoon. It is wonderful to have you here at the Ford School on this historic day. And it is wonderful to have the honorable Stacey Abrams here with us at the Ford School. Welcome. I am Celeste Watkins Hayes, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And I'm the founding director of our Center for Racial Justice. I'm delighted to welcome all of you here this afternoon for our final plenary session of this dean's symposium. It's really been an amazing two days and I am so grateful to all of you who have traveled to be here as part of a panel. I want to thank our faculty and staff who have worked to put this together and to our students for their engagement with the topics. Our keynote speaker today, as you know, is my friend Stacey Abrams. As you know, Stacey is a political leader who has dedicated herself to improving our democracy. She's a business owner, a bestselling author, a tax attorney, a nonprofit institution builder and a politician. She currently serves as the Ronald W. Walters endowed chair for race and black politics at Howard University. Stacey, welcome, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation we're about to have. So I want to acknowledge our co-sponsor, the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan and our media partner, Detroit Public Television. A quick note about our format. We will jump right into our conversation about democracy in the United States at this juncture and we'll have a wide-ranging conversations on a variety of topics. First, though, I would like to play a message to bring someone into the room with us that Stacey and I both know. Let's have a listen. My sisters, my brothers, my siblings all, good afternoon. I very much wish that I could be with you exactly where you are. But since I cannot, I'm grateful for this opportunity to be with you virtually at the end of this Dean's symposium. And how special it is for me to congratulate Dean Celeste Watkins Haynes on how she collaborated with our colleagues to imagine, to organize, and to present such a successful symposium. This is a symposium that will conclude with the opportunity to listen to, to be in close communication with, a conversation between two exceptional leaders. Ah, exceptional leaders. I'm talking about the Dean, the sister Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. And I am referring to the social justice activists that we have all come to know and count on. A conversation between Dr. Celeste Watkins Haynes and the Honorable Stacey Abel. What a joy and an honor it is for me to introduce this event because of the ties that bind me to Celeste and to Stacey. Each is my Spelman sister, and I claim each as my mentee. There's something that is truly special about a sisterly friendship across generations. I first met Celeste and Stacey when each arrived at Spelman. Spelman College, a historically black college for women, where they not only learn so much more about themselves, their history and her story, and the diverse cultures of the world. They also came to more fully own, fully own their responsibility to be activists in the ongoing struggles to bring more equity and justice to our communities, our nation, and our world. I enjoy the privilege of being one of their mentors. But how good it is that both Celeste and Stacey understand that a mentoring relationship should always involve reciprocity. Of course, a mentor should teach her mentees, but she also must learn from them as well. There's a wonderful African proverb that captures this. It says, she who teaches must learn, and she who learns must teach. Now as I bring closure on my brief remarks, I want to turn to the students who are here. As you surely know and feel every day, we are in the midst of an unusually challenging and indeed troubling time in our country and in our world. It is a time when policies and practices on every level in government are being enacted that attack and dismantle basic rights in a democracy. Our civil rights continue to be attacked. Our voting rights are under attack. The right of women to make autonomous decisions about their own bodies, that's under attack. Rights of the LGBTQ community are under attack. And yes, the rights of professors and their students to teach and learn basic truths about our nation's past and ongoing challenges, all of that is under attack. And so my young sisters, brothers and siblings, I urge you to see yourselves as next up, next up, to carry on the movements for civil rights, for women's rights, for the rights of LGBTQ people, for voters' rights. I urge you to carry on the struggle for attention to the health disparities that haunt our nation, to climate change that is doing such damage to our world. Whatever issues speak most strongly to you, not only care about them, do something about them. And so dear students, please hear me when I say ever so sincerely, I and all in my generation, all of the generations before you are counting on you to carry on the struggles for a far better, more equitable and just world. My warmest greetings to my spelling sisters, Celeste and Stacey, and to all who are gathered with them. And now I'd like to invite Stacey to join me in conversation. How are you doing, friend? I'm good. How are you? As people saw in the video, Stacey and I met at Spellman College. We were student leaders together sitting exactly where our students are seated now. And I want to reflect back to that time, what experiences were formative for you as a student leader? And how do they show up in your political career now and in your politics? So Celeste is leaving out a little bit of the story. We met when she was a freshman and I was a sophomore. We met in line at the, basically the upstairs was our cafeteria downstairs was the student government association office and you had to go and sign up to run for student government. Celeste wanted to stand, we're standing in line together waiting to go and fill out our paperwork and Celeste was going to run to be student trustee. And that role meant that you were going to sit on the board of trustees for Spellman College. I had a little bit of experience with that role. I did not hold that job, but I wasn't as satisfied as I should have been with the person who held the job before her. Because I had crashed a board meeting my freshman year because they were raising my tuition but not raising my scholarship. And so that's actually how Jeanette Cole got to know me and still didn't kick me off campus. So my student activism began with protesting. I left the bursar's office where they were explaining to me how much more money I owed and I'm like, unless you suddenly found a trust fund for me, I don't know where you think it's coming from. And as I was going, I asked like, how do I protest this? I didn't use that language. I was crying a little bit, but she mentioned that the board of trustees was meeting. So I had on my cleanest jeans and my nice t-shirt and I went and knocked on the door of the board of trustees meeting and demanded to be let in. And the secretary of the college opened the door. She's like, who are you? I'm like, she knows me because I've been complaining about things since I got there. And Jeanette Cole looked at me. She got up and she walked over and she looked at me and she said, we do not have a rule that forbids her entry, so let her in. And so I walk into the board meeting and one of the board members scoots over and like points to the seat beside him. So I sit down and I participate in my first board meeting and they let me basically give a speech about why what they were doing was wrong. And I explained that I wanted to stay at Spellman, but if they did not close that gap, I could not stay. My family didn't have the resources and we had exhausted all of the financial aid that was available. And so in the process, I gave a pretty effective speech and I think they were probably, I don't know if they were already thinking about it. They tell me it changed things. I don't know that I believe them, but they actually suspended the decision to raise tuition that year and they delayed it to the following year. It went up a lot the following year, but at least for that year, we had time to plan. And so my freshman year, that was my first moment. So when I'm standing in line, my sophomore year I served as the social media advisor, which means that's before we knew what social media was. That simply meant that I ran the projector when we had movie nights. There was no internet. But when she was standing in line, I was standing in line because I was going to run to be vice president of the student body. And there had not been a sophomore who had run for that job before. I was running because the person who I knew was going to run was a perfectly lovely person now, but at the time had made a series of choices that I found objectionable and had not been valuable enough about the concerns of students on campus, especially poor students. And the transformative moment for me was that the SGA would give away turkeys during Thanksgiving. And she was responsible. The person who had the job of responsibility decided that she wanted to go to a party. And so she left all the turkeys and the baskets that we painstakingly collected, sitting outside the door, basically on this plaza, locked the building, and then left. And so families who were coming to pick up this food, they hadn't expected it, and it rained. And so all of the food got ruined. She'd never experienced hunger before. She had never experienced the doubt that comes with knowing whether your family is going to be able to celebrate. I had that experience. And when we called her on it, her dismissive attitude for me was so egregious that I decided I wanted to have that job. I wanted to be the person who could make that difference. I also just wanted to beat her. And so sometimes activism is pure, and sometimes it's petty. So Celeste and I are standing in line together, and she tells me that she's standing for Student Trustee, and I tell her I'm running for Vice President of the Student Body. And we've been friends ever since. But for me, what mattered and what Celeste wanted to do, Celeste's older sister had been at Spelman. And I remember Celeste saying that her sister told her that if she wanted things to be better, she needed to be one of the people helping make the decisions. And that's the core of student activism. That's the core of activism. It's the core of democracy. It's wanting to do something to make change. And it's not waiting for an invitation because I was not someone people would have picked out to run for. In fact, people were very upset that I did, which was also very formative because that's happened a lot of times since then, too. But it was for me this moment of taking my personal experiences, my expectations of power, and my opportunity to have influence and trying to pull them all together. And that was my beginning. And I remember, and by the way, your campaign theme song. I can't remember if it was for this first election or senior year. It was the same year. But yes. Lenny Kravitz, are you going to go my way? In Sister's Chapel, I can see it like it was yesterday. You laying out your platform of all the things that you wanted to do around financial aid, around how we pay the employees on Spelman's campus, around LGBTQ inclusion. Yes. And you kept going back to, are you going to go my way? And we would come to work together over many years. And I wonder if you can talk about one of the things that I noticed when we were student leaders together was your awareness of the levers of power when you're at the table and inside an institution and the levers of power when you're outside of an institution trying to agitate. And the Spelman board meetings where you and I were often the only students in the room was a moment where we were at the table. But then there were also moments through your activism where you were very much outside right and pushing. I wonder if you can talk about that because so many of our students grapple with this question of do I want to be a part and within an institution and try to change it from within? Or do I want to push hard against it from the outside? How have you thought about that throughout your career? The answer is yes. Because it depends on what you need and it depends on which doors are open to you and which doors you can knock down. But sometimes you don't want to be in the institution, but you want the institution to know that you exist. So for me, what's less alludes to, so my second camp, when I ran for student body president, my theme song was are you going to go my way? When I ran for vice president, it was right now by Van Halen. Because then I was righteously indignant about a completely different set of issues. And I learned that right now felt good, but it was not the answer. So instead of right now like I'm going to demand all these things change, by the time I got to my senior year it was are you going to go my way? I needed people to come with me to make that change happen. And that was not only a change in theme song, it was also a change in thematic approach. When you're on the inside, you feel like, and people sometimes expect you to be able to change things right now, but institutions are stubborn. Problems are often, they're not intractable, but they feel that way. They're obdurate at the very least. And there is a hope that because you're in the space that that proximity to power makes power yield itself to you. And that does not work. But by being in the space you can figure out where the power lies. You can figure out the cracks and the schisms. And by being inside you can learn to exploit those things to get the things you need. But it also creates a space for you to be a reporter. And often people can learn to navigate what's happening on the outside if someone on the inside just explains it. But it's often the black box that creates the problem. You know the input and you know the output. You have no idea what happens in the process. And so distrust grows because of a black box. Obstinacy grows. Anger grows when there's an absence of information. Full transparency is never possible because often full transparency means that you can't actually help people because everyone is paralyzed by all the eyes on them. So there is always going to be some black box to process and to change. But at least by being in the room you have the ability to be a translations matrix to say this is what's happened. And if it didn't change, let me at least not defend why but explain why. Because sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes you are sitting making the choice and no one's going to like it and you may be wrong in your choice or they may just not decide they agree with your answer. But there is an integrity to being able to say this is how it happens. But when you can't be in the room you have the right to demand to know and that's the part of being the external agitator. If there is a black box your job is to make somebody explain it. So either you're the person in the room who becomes the translations matrix or you're the person on the outside demanding the translation happen. And so that was actually preceded last time at Spelman the first time I did this. After the Rodney King decision in 1992 I worked with a group of students. We let this peaceful march to City Hall and then we continued to lift our outrage. The mayor of Atlanta the man who had been the first black man elected to be mayor in the south. He was the mayor again at the time and Mayor Jackson was an extraordinary leader. But he decided that because there were protests that it was going to turn into Los Angeles. So he cordoned off the Atlanta University Center for oldest black colleges these four black colleges and this poor area of Atlanta. He blocked off the freeway had police cars lining the streets and then they tear gassed us. I was not happy. So I organized students and we started calling all of the television stations which was a lot easier because back then there were only three of them. But we started blocking and making them we're like this is not true. This is misinformation. We didn't use that like you're lying. This is what's actually happening. And I was at one point students were someone asked like who's the it was happening the reporters that we were calling the new stations. They're like well who's calling. And so someone came to my room because I got like 40 students engaged and they're like they're asking for our name. I'm like just told them you're me. I did not think that through. So you had a bunch of young women calling saying I'm Stacey Abramson. I'm like that was really poor strategy because they send a police car to get me and they knew who to ask for. But because of that I ended up going to this town hall meeting with the mayor. I argued with him. He won that argument handily. I was not prepared. But in the aftermath he hired me to work for the Office of Youth Services that he created in part because of the complaints I raised. And I hesitated over taking the job because I was also running this group called Students for African-American Empowerment. And we were righteously indignant and we were activists. And could I do that and work for the city. And I decided yes, because there were tools and levers and responsibilities that the city had. And my job was to make them use it for good. But that didn't diminish the other problems and challenges that I saw. For example, the fact that the state of Georgia at the time had the Confederate battle flag as the flag of the state of Georgia. I couldn't walk into a public building without being confronted by the Confederacy. And I was not willing to compromise one part of myself to validate the other part. And part of the navigation of activism of leadership is being willing to hold all of you in tension, but also to deal with the consequences. You don't get to act with impunity. Activism has a risk. That's why being still is easier. And so part of the challenge, and I think what we both learned at Spellman, is that being righteous does not make you right. And being an activist does not mean that people are going to validate what you do. And there are consequences. There were consequences for the decisions we made. There are consequences for the choices we asked people to make. And part of leadership is the ability to accept that those consequences will happen, to manage those consequences, but to never lose sight of the fact that you are speaking both for and with others. And that that means sometimes you want to be in the room to mitigate the harm. You want to be outside the room to amplify the need, but that you're always supposed to be a person who can be the bridge between what is and what should be. And part, so much of your career is, and what I'm hearing from you, is the maturity of an activist, right? Having that identity as core to who you are from college, still core to who you are, and you talking about the kinds of lessons learned. I wonder if you can talk about, in this moment, there is so much frustration about the state of democracy. We're starting a new initiative at the Ford School called Resilient Democracies. I'll ask you, Fran, is that a bad title? It's an aspiration. It's an aspiration. Unpack that, if you would. Democracy is fragile. We are in the midst, for those of you who study foreign affairs, we're in the midst of a wave election year. 64 elections happening around the country. And democracy is not winning all of them. If you watched what happened in Senegal, that's one of the best-case scenarios, where one of the stalwarts of democracy, Mackie Saul, who's the president of Senegal, called off the election, stunning everyone. Luckily, he reversed course and reinstituted the election. But in the process, he undermined the faith in democracy that had been one of the hallmarks of Senegal. We saw what happened in El Salvador. We watched what happened with Victor Orban in Hungary. Democracy is a construct. And it requires this shared commitment in the shared belief system that it can work. And when the leaders, when those who are the attendants to democracy, violate that trust, democracy falters. We've seen it here. Voter suppression is an attack on democracy. Because you cannot trust a system that does not trust you. Resilience, then, is how do we not stop the attacks, but how do we build the capacity to withstand them? That's what resilient democracy is. It's not that the attacks aren't going to happen. It's not that voter suppression isn't going to exist. It's not that authoritarianism and demagoguery won't rise. It's that we have built the internal capacity to withstand its assault. And that we have trained our people to understand and deconstruct, and therefore respond. And so, when I hear resilient democracy, I hear a call to action, but it's also a practicum. It's about teaching people how to hold democracy, how to keep it, not when it's easy, but when it's hard. How to maintain it, not when everyone agrees, but when people are trying to bastardize what it means. And it's doing so when people will call into question, your right to call into question whether democracy is at risk. Our Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Jenna Bednar, I don't know if she's here, is, Yes, is leading up our work in resilient democracies. And one of the things that Jenna talks about is, yes, the importance of democratic institutions, but also the importance of democratic norms and democratic cultures. So I wonder if you can just take us through each of those, because you've had a lot of interaction with institutions, the norms, and the culture, that piece of it that's hard to articulate, but it is so very important. I wonder if you can walk us through those three things. So let's start with institutions. As a nation, the United States is a study in the fragility and resilience of democracy. We began with voter suppression. We have had voter suppression for roughly 248 years. When the nation started, knowing who was here, voting was restricted to white men who were landowners. That was it. Everyone else who gets to vote had to fight to get there. Everyone else who gets to participate has had to struggle. And in fact, there's one community that had the right to vote and then lost it. And that would black people. Reconstruction gave us the right. And then if you lived in the south, which was roughly at the time, it was actually more than half the population of African-Americans, we were given a right in the Constitution and then had it stripped away from us. And yet we believed women fought for suffrage. And even after that suffrage was granted, it was muted by policies that said that women couldn't buy their own homes with only their names, even if they had the cash until the 1970s. We have to remember that institutions do not change even if the language changes. That struggle requires that we continue to hold ourselves to our ideals and that we remind ourselves of what those ideals are and that the institutions have to adapt to who we say we think we are. And we can come back to it, but that's one of the reasons I'm one of my areas of interest right now is the defense of DEI. Because the struggles that we have had to make democracy real sit within the DEI framework. So that's one piece. And the institutions cannot be corrupted by those who want that power for themselves. When the leaders of institutions lever power in order to benefit themselves and their ends, it undermines faith in the institution. I had some personal experience with that, where when the people in charge of being guardians of democracy are willing to corrupt that democracy for their ends or worse, when they are willing to diminish that democracy for others. When the institution makes that decision, that's when it's problematic. That's what voter suppression is. Voter suppression is not just people don't get to vote. It's when institutions, when democratic institutions take the onus upon themselves to limit access. Voter suppression is can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted? And so anytime institutions are undertaking rules and regulations and laws to limit, can you register? Can you stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And can that ballot get counted? That's the fight over be able to file an absentee ballot and what date is on there. That because you didn't read subsection 2.75 and because you moved from a state that had a different set of rules and you didn't go and get the voter manual, that your right to vote is now extinguished. So we have to recognize that institutions don't simply exist to create, they exist to protect. That then leads you to democratic norms. I got into a little bit of trouble in recent years because I violated a democratic norm in 2018 and I gave a speech acknowledging that I had not won an election but refusing to countenance the existence of voter suppression. And in the process, I have been both lauded and chastened and vilified for how I did it. And I want to be really clear, I have never once denied the outcome of an election. But I did say that we have the responsibility to question the administration of elections. We should never be a nation that says that you can't ask questions. We should never be in a position where we cannot use the levers and the tools of our democracy to hold our democracy accountable. That's how we protect democracy. I was in Nigeria in February of 2023 observing an election and I was part of a bipartisan delegation where our joint statement was we know that there were going to be challenges. Please use the systems necessary to question the election. We encourage the opposition leader who lost to use the law to challenge the systems. That belongs to all of us. Our norms should not be that we can't question. Our norm is that we can't lie. We can't manufacture and we can't foment unrest because we are dissatisfied. But when we decide that the norm is all or nothing we create space for nothing or we give countenance to all and we have got to return to a democratic norm that allows us to actually say maybe this shouldn't have happened this way maybe we should have done something different maybe we can be better. That's okay and you don't have to agree with me. You don't even have to agree with my position on this conversation but democratic norms say that we don't treat everyone the same so that we don't have to treat anything as different and that then leads to culture. As a cultural imperative we have to believe in the capacity of this nation to be better than it was that we have the right to demand more and that my elevation does not require your diminution and right now we treat politics and democracy as the same and they are not. Politics is a tool for public policy but we are watching policy serve as a tool for our politics and when that happens those who do not share your politics become weapons or become victims but when politics are a tool for policy you have the namesake of this university would never vote for him in my life but Gerald Ford understood the difference between politics as a tool versus politics as a weapon and politics is a tool to do the public policy that needs to be done and as a cultural norm we have to return to a moment where it's okay to work with someone you disagree with in order to achieve your ends. I served as minority leader in Georgia for seven years. I joke that minority leader is Latin for lose well. They give you the name leader because they want you to feel good about yourself but they put minority in front of it so you don't forget yourself. I wasn't going to pass a bill I wasn't going to achieve a thing unless I got the majority to work with me and so my mission I would always say I had three jobs my first job was cooperation I needed to find ways I could work with the majority to get things done because Georgians didn't care about my politics they cared about their lives and part of our cultural approach to democracy has to be a restoration of cooperation as a native good it is not a compromise of my values to compromise my vision I can still imagine great things but I've got to get there and sometimes that means I have to narrow my vision that doesn't mean I have to change my value system and we have now conflated the two so much cultural truth we don't trust people who aren't so obstinate about what they want that they can hear other people some of my best friends are republicans that's not true but I work very well and very closely with the GOP I mean I got along well with the speaker of the house I learned how to be a better legislator because of him and some of my favorite moments in the legislature were when we would have to talk about things and he's like say I don't agree with you I don't agree with you either but what do we need to get done today and how do we work on this together so that's one piece my second job was competition I thought my ideas were better I thought my party's ideas were better and my job was to articulate why it wasn't just to say I'm right because I'm right it was to say I'm right and show why and that's why you guys are here if the policies that you have are good then the politicians will take them and maybe they'll give you credit they probably won't but the mission is for you to create policies that are so resonant and so effective that the competition of ideas will lift those up and that the political norms will create space for my party or the other party or if we decide we want to be pluralistic more parties to come to the table but we want to create space where competition is not a cage match so it's competition it's cooperation competition and then third and most important to me it's accountability going back to the idea of democracy as a construct we have to have a collective hallucination that this is working and when we can't trust the process when we don't trust the people when accountability doesn't exist then democratic resiliency cannot be because when the people don't believe there is nothing to protect and so I believe that the way we tie all of those together is to acknowledge that there are going to be fractures there are going to be fault lines there are going to be mistakes some are made with animus a lot more made from ignorance and that ultimately we are a nation of many ideas and many people some of those ideas are repugnant most of them are actually pretty mainstream and I don't want to diminish the necessity I mean I live in a state where I no longer technically have bodily autonomy so I I'm very clear that there are bounds in my mind but we have to get back to the place where we can have those conversations and where we can coalesce people to do something about it and we lose so many people who just check out entirely not because of apathy but because they are overwhelmed because they are despairing because they don't see a pathway through and that's the place where democratic resilience becomes the most important it's not when politicians do better it's when people believe that politicians are necessary that's when we actually see our institutions correct so what you have laid out is really a democratic toolkit and I want to unpack a little more deeply conversations across difference you talked about that and we can talk about all kinds of forms of difference that are polarizing us if anybody has a reason to not advocate for conversations across difference it's probably you in the sense that you had which we all know a very real and visceral experience and a very public experience and where the other side disagreed with you disagreed with you publicly created a whole struggle for you led to that speech that you gave that was not a concession speech and yet here you are saying we have to talk to people who disagree with you how do you go back into the arena how do you have a willingness to still put your hand out and have a conversation I grew up in the south here's what I mean by that there is nothing noble about having nothing there's no nobility in losing because you are obstinate there's nobility in trying there's nobility in struggle and there's nobility in loss but that loss has to be preceded by effort I don't define myself by the outcomes I grew up in spaces where my outcomes were not only predetermined they had laws about them when I stood for governor in 2018 there were so many people who lauded oh she's the first black woman to ever get the nomination in American history like it's 2018 this is ridiculous that is not a celebratory moment for me that is a condemnation of systems and I'm still the only it still hasn't happened and the reality is I can either dwell on the outcomes or I can focus my attention on the effort there is work that needs to be done and I believe in that work and there are platforms that make that work easier there are platforms that have certain tools attached to them and I want to be able to use those tools but not getting the job does not exempt you from the work not getting the title doesn't absolve you of responsibility and so my personal resilience comes in that I don't define myself by the outcome I define myself by the efforts I am not naive enough to think that everyone thinks that way and there are those for whom my repeated attempts at things or my refusal to be cowed is seen as either cowardice or I am being willfully blind it's none of the above I was there I know I lost I am really clear about that but what I'm not willing to do is to say that because I didn't win I don't try again I grew up the progeny of parents my dad's father was conscripted into world war two and the Korean war and when he returned from both wars was not permitted to vote for the president who sent him to war wasn't allowed to vote in Mississippi my grandmother worked for 40 years in the college for the first 20 years she worked there her children were legally not permitted to apply to that college my mother's father was born 25 years after the end of slavery and I got to be the first black woman to be the nominee for governor in any state in America so part of my continued spirit is that I don't I haven't earned the right to be mad yet I haven't earned the right to give up but more importantly I think it's the nephews who still have barriers who have barriers to their dreams barriers to their ambitions and my responsibility if I was telling the truth when I stood for those offices is that I've got to keep trying but I also have to learn and the way I say it is you learn your lessons not your losses we are taught especially in politics to learn our losses that you know if you didn't get it you need to go okay some of us taught that it's not a universal lesson but there is there certainly is a norm especially for women and people of color you get one shot maybe two but after that you need to sit down I don't buy that because my issue is when you're the first or the second somebody's got to go and learn and somebody's got to bring those lessons back and I may not get the benefit but I can at least share the lesson so I didn't win in 18 or in 22 but you know I sent some proxies ahead and that too matters when people believe that they have the right to participate when we change an electorate's belief systems that's progress and so the other platitude I'll give you is you know victory is a great marker but so is progress and sometimes progress is what you're going to get and especially when you start from a position of marginalization from a posture of imposter I know I'm not an imposter but when you have imposter where you are seen as an upstart in a space sometimes the fact that they have to acknowledge your presence is huge progress and so I encourage everyone when you are in an active a space we all want the end of that great movie sometimes we just get a really good episode and that's okay too because that episode could turn into a mini series could turn into it could get picked up for syndication so let's go so friend I have not asked you in a long time if you intend to run for office again you don't need to ask me now either and I'm not going to ask you now and I'm not going to ask you now but what I'm hearing is a really interesting framework for how you think about it and a framework that I think is very instructive for our students because I think that so many people are afraid to run for office for a number of reasons but one of them is what if I don't win that election the word you're looking for is loose what if you lose and the idea that that possibility prevents people from going into the arena they're losing is not fun it's innovating it is humiliating it is exhausting and it is informative you learn about you you learn about people you thought liked you you learn about what's called the lie factor the people are like oh I'm with you until you turn to them and you're like where'd you go but you also learn that it's a process I don't know for what I will run again but I am not done with politics that's clear because it is a tool to me it's an important and effective tool for policy and therefore I refuse to say no to it and there are lots of people on twitter who have very definitive opinions about whether I should ever stand for office again and they are not ashamed to tell me what those are but I cannot be defined by someone else's expectations of me or the limitations they would put on me there aren't enough of us to quit because the system didn't change overnight there haven't been enough opportunities for us and when I say as I use that broadly to cover most communities have not found representation representation matters identity matters respect matters and you cannot get those things if you are not seen and if people aren't in the arena fighting for it the embarrassment of loss is not enough it is not sharp enough it is not painful enough and it is not permanent enough to keep me from fighting again let's talk about another thing that you laid out as part of our conversations around resilient democracies and that is weaponization of policy, politics you talked about taking a principled stand and making a statement and questioning something we see how others have weaponized why I have questions too about the outcome of the election we have seen the explosion you talked about being social media with social media in this information environment what many had hoped would be a hugely democratizing democratizing tool we are seeing weaponized so talk about the kind of perniciousness of weaponization right now you really have a cottage industry of people figuring out how can this tool be used to maintain power to make money to do any number of things beyond the kind of high ideals of a democratic process look information has always been both a tool and a weapon I mean from the moment papyrus was found and someone learned how to use a quill they started lying about somebody or putting out misinformation I mean how many of you have seen Hamilton how many of you remember the third act information is power and so people will always manipulate information to concentrate power what has happened is not just democratization did happen but so did fracturing and so did the ability to curate at a subatomic level lies that feel real and lies that speak to our deepest concerns and our most fundamental animosities when you can curate your own reality it is a dangerous thing because that means you often cannot be disturbed by truth that was harder to do and I said this I was talking to some students earlier when I grew up you had ABC, NBC and CBS so you had Tom Brokaw Dan Rather and my personal favorite Peter Jennings telling you the news and then you sometimes you can watch Jim Lehrer do it but everyone had the same news everyone had the same truth you even got it at the same time it came at the exact same time every night and so we all had the same information it was just which guy with varying degrees of gray hair was going to tell you what was happening you then saw the proliferation of cable television so you saw CNN and then Fox and then social media but the DNA of disinformation is not new the proliferation is but what's also happened has been an erosion of our capacity to sift through that information that's the real danger people don't know how to tell the truth from fiction anymore and then you layer on that AI and the ability to I think it was in the El Salvador election to actually mimic to a degree that has been unseen in human history to create fake reality that feels as real as the truth we cannot stop information it has never worked well it does but it's called North Korea it's called authoritarianism I mean when you stop information when you curate information and you say that you can't have it or it won't go out the wrong way that is often the beginning of demagoguery and authoritarianism so instead of being able to stop the flow you have to create the dams that help control the flow and that is training people to understand what to look for it is what unfortunately happens sometimes with fake photographs and people they will pour over and oh that's I can tell you this that's actually a skill we should all be learning we need to learn how to discern the truth we need to trust that and part of the loss came about because we as a society have watched segments of our society devalue education devalue learning when segments of our society tell us that we can't learn truths that they don't like not that they aren't real but they don't like them we are teaching people not to think and we're teaching people to be susceptible to poor information to misinformation which is a slight skewing and outright lie we are weakening not only our democracy but we're weakening our competitive edge and so my deep concern is that in the pursuit of power we are creating we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction because we think that if we control the information or curate information that seeds our success that that can't somehow topple us over and we know that if you look at fallen empires part of what fells an empire is disinformation and misinformation when you start to believe that the person who intends for your good actually intends for your ill the reaction can be biblical so talk to us about how you begin to do those things so many of us have identified and agree with you on that challenge we're thinking about it as a policy school how do we train our students to be able to interpret and analyze information and tell fact from fiction there's this amazing young woman named sosa osa who worked for me at fair fight worked for fair fight action I served as the chair and the founder she now runs her own organization called onyx impact and it focuses on disinformation directed at black communities that is one of the least studied and most effective tools of disinformation and it is almost impossible to get people to pay attention because this is a population that is often under looked we know that the latino population span population also incredible target of disinformation and the reality is there has to be going back to your very first question there has to be an inside outside game so inside this school there should be courses on disinformation how to identify it how to correct it and how to guard against it for example you never repeat a myth you never repeat a lie people only remember the lie being repeated they don't remember that you said it's a lie they just remember that you said it again and our brains are sticky especially with stupid stuff we will hold things and so we have to be trained this should be part of coursework learning how to spot disinformation there are a couple of really good websites and every so often I'll go on the website because it's a little game can you spot the disinformation so it'll be a fact or it'll be an image can you tell what's real or not I do that to train myself because I do I can get confused too I didn't know I love Idris Elba I don't ever want to learn something about him I don't like but somebody might put out a photograph that makes me wonder and I need to be ready to defeat it so I do I practice what I preach the second then is that when we see or hear it we have to call it out but we have to call it out with fact not with outrage outrage just meets fire with fire fact meets fire with extinguishment with water with foam and so we have to be able to extinguish the fire it's not to say that some people won't want to still get burned but at least you've given them an alternative and so it's being trained in the process of how to effectively respond and that's one thing Asosa has been really helpful with she trained me on how to do that during my campaign when you're debating it's going to be a shock but when you debate sometimes your opponent lies or says something it's not quite accurate and your instinct is to repeat what they've said to then challenge it and you have to hold I mean in debate 101 you learn you don't take the bait it's hard to remember when your blood is boiling and your camera is on you but what stayed in my mind was that she taught me this is how you think about this is how you respond we've got to build that into our training just as much as someone is trained to write a policy paper they have to be trained to debunk myth and to respond and then we've got to go outside of the confines of the conclave and do it for the public we are all part of organizations and communities that need our help that need your expertise and sometimes we feel shy about sharing it or it feels not worth our time and sometimes it just feels out of place but we've got to be the purveyors of truth we've got to be the purveyors of the skills we have you should train a girl scout troop you should go and find a girl scout troop or go to boys and girls club and once you've learned how to do this yourself teach someone else if we do not teach people especially those who don't think they need to know or don't know there's a problem then you knowing it is insufficient because you just become not a tool or a weapon you just become a statue of what was possible an instrument of what we can accomplish one of the other things I know people are very concerned about is within electoral politics the electoral college there's conversation about what about other possibilities what about ranked choice voting what about what do we do about gerrymandering talk to us about the voting ecosystem and I know all of our students have any number of ideas and suggestions about how do you deal with the kind of structural challenges of making sure that our representatives are truly representing the whole and the community and the people you do realize I have to go back to Georgia at some point I do I gave you a menu of things to pick up okay so when we have to have a democracy that's job one so let's save that first and then let's make it better so electoral college is grounded in voter suppression it is the most perfect example of it where where your geography determines the value of your vote and given the importance that the federal government has in our lives it is deeply concerning to me that we maintain a system that is designed to quell the voices of millions that is a problem and it is counter to who we say we are and we should abolish the electoral college I have no questions about that Jerry Mandering Jerry Mandering is when politicians get to pick their voters not voters picking their politicians so I created an organization called Fair Count which actually focuses on the census because Jerry Mandering begins with the US Census every 10 years we seem to invade the privacy of others and there are communities whose legitimate cynicism and fear convince them not to participate and then they live for 10 years 20 years 30 years with the consequences of their lived realities and their refusal to share data so Fair Fight actually Fair Count focuses on how do we ensure an accurate census we know when an accurate census happens and there's accountability in the process we get better voting outcomes if you look at what happened in Alabama with the Milligan decision it was because Alabama had a more a more accurate census that they then were able to prove that there were enough black voters who were not being represented that they had to draw a new district the same thing happened in Georgia it's happened in Louisiana and it happens not just at the state level but it should happen at the local level school boards are determined by the census and so we have to do a better job and I'm telling all of you here we have to treat the census as a 10 year organizing opportunity it is a statistical marvel that controls trillions of dollars and if you know the community that could not get PPE during COVID it was often because they were undercounted in the previous census the funds were allocated for their needs and they did not have access to the resources and because they were already marginalized every pathology that visits upon those communities got amplified and so if you hear nothing else I say besides democracy is good census good make it work so there's that then the next piece of that then is if you want to stop gerrymandering you have to hold politicians accountable we can usually maybe name our congressional leader most of us I mean I know I'm talking the wrong community you guys can probably find your state legislator most people can't let alone their city council member their county commissioner or the judges that decide things and so we've got to do a better job of making sure we connect the dots for people that our participation in the electoral process is not just about who's in the on the ballot it's about who's in the booth if you want better juries you have to be a registered voter if you want better judgements judges have to know you know they get elected and that you're going to show up in those elections and so part of the way we fix the global or at least the national architecture of democracy is by starting at the state and local level where most of the issues happen and where most of the power resides but we are trained to focus on the bright shiny light of Washington DC often to the detriment of those who need attention at the local level that's why my focus is on state and local politics because I know that's where most of the things that I'm mad about happen and where many of the solutions can be tested and implemented and so all of you who want to go to DC congratulations the rest of you go home because that's where the help is needed and then once we stabilize our democracy and we're going through a fracturing polarizing moment that is not unusual what is unusual is that the composition of the country because of the success of the diversity equity and inclusion movement means that more people's voices have to be heard and here's what I mean by movement DEI is not something that was cooked up in a laboratory it is not a boring seminar you go to on Thursday because of HR DEI describes 248 years of struggle to make America what it said it wanted to be reconstruction suffrage the jacana movement the indian-american movement the asian-american movement the disability movement every the labor rights movement every movement in American history that has expanded the franchise expanded access and removed barriers to the American dream is part of DEI they are trying to relegate it and constrain it to this very narrow misinformed if not intentionally misleading narrative because when we realize that we've been at it for 248 years the reality is they're mad because we're winning we are winning because if you are disabled you have now the legal right to protest in ways you did not have 100 years ago or 50 years ago 50 years ago you did not have the right to demand accommodation it is not just about whether a black kid gets into college although that matters too it is about every community that has had to struggle to make the law recognize their humanity and their citizenship and therefore we have to defend and protect DEI with every fiber of our being because DEI is a description of every movement we have had because every one of those movements are pointed to the American dream and there are three ways you get there education economics and elections it's what do you know what can you do and who's in charge and therefore if we want to defend and protect democracy we should defend them to protect DEI because that is the way accountable when you can constrain who participates you can then start to eliminate whose voices matter and so if you hear nothing else I say go DEI so much of our conversation you have moved from the domestic to the global I wonder if you can kind of call that out and talk more about that because people sometimes frame you focus solely on domestic politics but you're involved in a lot of things in terms of global democracy it's so important for us to have that integration so I've been involved in foreign study for a very long time I actually got into a fight a very fervid debate with a friend of mine who was in foreign policy we were Truman Scholars together and we were having lunch and we got into a debate about whether domestic policy was more important in foreign policy he was wrong and I was right or so I thought and then he challenged me and he said how will you know what to ask for here if you don't know what's happening in the world now look I read The Economist I listened to NPR I knew that the world existed but I never and I took a really good foreign policy class from Dr. Shafi at Spelman so I was informed but I was not immersed and then he said I had no good rebuttal and I really really don't like when will can win and so I decided I needed to expand my foreign policy understanding and so since then I've been to 17 countries I've done 11 foreign policy fellowships I've been very intentional I've done East Asian studies I've studied in Italy I've done an Italian fellowship I did one with I'm doing one right now with Columbia University thinking about foreign policy and domestic policy and how they sit cheap by jail I serve on the board of the National Democratic Institute really pushing for democracy globally it has made me better at my domestic work because one we don't have all the answers here we also don't have all the questions and when you learn about the other questions you don't lose that knowledge when you start thinking about it locally but we are not the first nation to grapple with issues of race and gender and equality we have allies who grapple with this and we have examples of what it looks like to do it right we have nations like Rwanda that have deep challenges when it comes to gender issues but they also have more women in parliament than we have in Congress as a percentage of the population so there are places that are struggling but where we can also learn and I think that for me is the three line because whether I'm learning from someone I oppose politically or someone who has a different life experience or someone who lives in a different country I am better at what I do when I know more about what needs to be done and I am eager to gather information from whatever repository will allow me entry I also know that when America does better the world does better that our success amplify success but then our failures and our falters also have consequences and I want to be able to be part of us being our best version of ourselves but I also want to see what that can look like in the places where they may have tried it before and we now know what it can look like if we do it here we have questions from two members of the Ford School community I wonder if you can each introduce yourself and ask one question Thank you so much for this fascinating discussion my name is Emma Cohen I'm a second year Master of Public Policy student here at the Ford School Hi my name is Akila Malapudi I'm a junior string public policy and I'm an undergrad So our first question submitted by students is Stacey you are now a household name how did you realize that this is what or that you wanted to work in the public arena and did any particular event or person maybe including the first anecdote you shared influenced your goals and mission So Celeste will tell you that this is true I am an introvert if I could run for office in secret I would but apparently that's called dictatorship so we don't do it so I became involved in politics in part because I grew up in what is best described as working class working poor my mom called us the genteel poor we had no money but we watched PBS and we read books but my parents were very intentional about service because they had grown up during the civil rights movement my dad was arrested when he was 14 for registering black people to vote in Mississippi my mom was very actively involved when they were 16 and they combined forces and for the rest of my life we have been called to action my parents believed that you should do good I would go with my parents my five brothers and sisters we would go and volunteer places and I'm like look I know we're doing good but it seems like an inefficiency that these two black people and their six black children are going to fix Mississippi that does not seem to the math isn't and I asked why are we doing this shouldn't someone else be doing this and my mom and dad said that's government like these are things government should have done but for various reasons we were not we were serving populations that weren't being served and so I wanted to understand government my intention was to be a really good bureaucrat I occasionally ran for office when the bureaucrats wouldn't do what I wanted but that was just to get things done it was the most efficient way to do it it was not a driving call to action that I wanted to be in the public eye but I kept not politicians don't do what you tell them all the time it was really disappointing to learn and so I stood for office and once I did probably the most salient moment where there was really just sort of a light bulb for me was when I was in my fourth year in the legislature and I decided to run for leader you don't usually do that after four years you're supposed to be there a little longer but I watched a debate on the floor where the opposing party over the course of a few bills they passed one bill to strip poor Georgians of a five dollar credit they would there was a tradition in Georgia they would get you get a check it's like five dollars for each person in your family or something I forget all the particulars but it was a vestige of a tax break that had been given and a populist governor had demanded that this check go out and I watched person after person people who had never either have never needed or didn't remember need go to the well to argue about taking this money from the poor that we couldn't afford to give them this money and they didn't need it who needed an extra five dollars it didn't matter and I remembered and it was a recent memory just how much that could matter to a family but also the sheer insult and the dismissal of their need by people who were supposed to support and represent them was really troubling to me and it was juxtaposed a few hours later when the same people went to the well arguing for a tax break for wealthy retirees and in that moment I thought this and I knew both bills would be signed by the governor without question and I'm like I'm going to be the governor I have no idea how this is going to happen I thought but we need a governor who would never countenance this who would say that whether you are a military or a struggling family that you both belong here and develop here and so for me that was the moment I did not realize what it would become and if I had I may have got out in a line when I was standing with Celeste and gone back to my dorm but I do not regret it at all but we're all going to have moments and sometimes they're flashes and sometimes they're just moments where it clicks that maybe you see something other people don't or at least you're willing to say a loud the thing you see and so that's what I did thank you so much our next question is about taking action so what opportunities should we as students be doing to take advantage of the advantage of the opportunities that we have to get more involved in the political process and to receive the training that we need absolutely so I said this so if you heard me say this earlier pretend it's new you guys have an extraordinary opportunity you have superior knowledge opportunities and deep awareness there are people who are so hungry for what you can offer right now that you don't have to wait for later there are communities that don't imagine that they could send a child to the school they are barely able to fathom that they can get their child out of high school and they are sailed by challenges and public policy it's not that they don't understand the impact they don't know how it happened when I talked about that translation matrix earlier I mean that you guys have the ability to translate information to give people information to do a one pager when something happens and actually go to a community group that is activating and trying to get something done and say can I volunteer with you can I help write a one pager for you can I do talking points for your leaders can I help you with talking points can I tell you who's in charge of making this decision because you think it's this guy and it's actually this lady who shows up every week but didn't tell you what she was doing on the side and I've had that happen I got involved in one of the things I did in local politics was there was a legislator who kept voting to deny access to healthcare and all the people in their community were like well he's with us like no he's not he's against you every time but they had no idea and so you have the ability to come out of that black box or at least open it up a bit you have the ability to use just your basic knowledge and your fear your fearlessness to be a spokesperson not for people do not speak on their behalf but to speak to them about their capacity the training you get translate it offer it but do not wait until somebody's paying you for it or until you're ready to be important do it now because it's also extraordinary training I'm a better politician because I went to the zoning meetings as a college student because I accidentally wrote a speech for a politician because I was supposed to type it and there were way too many typographical errors and I rewrote it and I got to be a speech writer I'm like oh I can write speeches so we learn in the process of helping and I think that is what we forget in politics what we forget in policy we're doing this to help people so go help people now and that will make you better at whatever thank you I want to close with a lightning round okay okay hit me you are involved in three sectors the public which we heard about with Fair Fight and Fair Count the private and the non-profit tell us about a typical week in your life with those three sectors and the work that you're doing catch us up on all the different things you're doing okay I'll do a few days I do a lot look I applied for this job I didn't get it I've had some time on my hands I am writing a novel it is my third in the Avery Keene series it is due absurdly soon so I've got to get it done I have a production company that is taking some of I've written a bunch of books I have a production company that is helping turn some of my books into TV and film sometime in my lifetime and I so those are two of my creative efforts on the private sector my other private sector work is I'm a consultant for an organization called Rewiring America and this sort of straddles my private sector and non-profit sector work we are helping solve for the residential electrification opportunities in America Rewiring was recently part of a consortium that has been awarded resources to make sure that low to moderate income communities get access to heat efficient electric efficient appliances which sounds small but 42% of all of our carbon related emissions are made based on decisions in and around the home so what you drive how you heat and cool your home what you cook with all of those choices if we want to actually affect climate those things have to change and we know how to change it but most people either can't afford it or don't understand it and so I work with Rewiring to do that and one of our biggest projects is downtown called the Soto, Georgia population roughly they claim 170 I think I saw 150 technically it says 224 but we are revitalizing all of the homes that want to we're going to make sure every one of them gets an appliance so that they can see what it means to actually electrify see their costs go down and the best part of that story there was an elderly woman who was living without water in her home and she was in hot water for two months right before Christmas and because of our program we were able to give her a hot water heater and there's another family that lives in a double wide trailer who thought they would they basically have like six fans just trying to keep them cool and we are about to give them a new HVAC system that they never thought they could afford and so that's what I do then I work on DEI work so I've created a few organizations recently and I work with a group organizations that really are trying to protect defend and expand DEI because it is one of the ways we are a competitive nation and I want us to know that we have the right to and the responsibility to protect defend and expand diversity equity and inclusion because diversity means all people equity means fair access to opportunity and inclusion means a pathway to the American dream and then I'm going to come and talk because my friend called me and said come over here and I go to schools to do stuff so I'm here at Michigan but I have a fellowship with Columbia as I mentioned where I work on issues of digital equity so looking at Kenya and Georgia to think about what does digital equity mean in terms of global competitiveness but also the ability especially for women and girls to make the best lives possible and then I'm the inaugural chair for the Ron Walters and the Ron Walters inaugural chair for race and black politics so thinking about how we help Howard University continue to grow as a center of conversation for race and black politics without betraying my alma mater spell in college. Best piece of advice for successfully organizing and executing a grassroots campaign start by asking how can I help and then listen we often come with a solution without understanding or bothering to ask what the problem is my framework is this what's the problem, why is it a problem and how can we solve it and you can't get there if you don't ask how can I help. Best what's your vision for a democracy? that we have it how do you encourage people to vote even when they are frustrated with the candidates or their options I remind people that there are two things one it is not about who's on the ballot it's about who's in the booth when voting is about a candidate then you can be frustrated by the quality of the candidate but when voting is about you and your family and your community and your needs then your responsibility becomes the primary driver not their infirmities and the second is remembering that voting is not magic it is medicine magic fixes everything it's about what you've ever heard medicine requires that you take it over and over again sometimes it's more bitter than whatever is ailing you but we know that if we stop taking it whatever we have is going to mistasticize and it's coming back and it's bringing friends and so if you keep taking your medicine things get better if we stop taking our medicine whatever we're ill with is going to get worse last question your friend is dean of a school of public policy what advice do you have for our faculty for training this generation of students I would say that Celeste Watkins Hayes should be the exact person that I know her to be someone who is thoughtful and inquisitive and a risk-taker and that you should empower and encourage everyone in your orbit to do the same it will be awkward, it will be uncomfortable it will sometimes challenge your leadership but I know you are strong enough to withstand the challenge and it will be better for having you in charge our faculty our staff on behalf of the students and the faculty and the staff who are such important partners here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan thank you for being here thank you I think they want us to take a picture okay we'll just go through this here this is the closing