Georgia corporations tried to interfere with our democracy. We didn’t let them
In the last general election, Georgians delivered our country from the hands of fascism by securing Democrats in the White House and the Senate. As payback for doing so, Republicans are waging an unholy war against voting rights in the state, pushing Jim Crow-style measures like SB 202 into law, which will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of Georgians to cast their ballots. This dangerous bill impacts specific communities the most: Black, brown, young, and new voters in Georgia.
Many voters don’t know that Republicans aren’t working alone to disenfranchise us. Their accomplices were some of the most powerful corporations in our state. In fact, Georgiabased companies like Delta, Coca-Cola and Home Depot previously bankrolled the backers of voter suppression bills to the tune of over $7.4m.
To put salt in the wound, the very companies that backed Georgia’s bigoted lawmakers were the same ones that ran sophisticated Black History Month campaigns in February, and issued public statements claiming their support of voting rights for all. The hypocrisy was astounding. Corporations treated the civil rights of Georgians as pieces on a gameboard. These laws, however, have serious consequences for many of our communities. This raises the question: what role do corporations play in upholding our democracy?
If you ask me – and many Americans across the country – it’s an incredibly important one.
Last summer proved to be a reckoning for all the different ways white supremacy and its offshoots harm people of color and the youth every day, and the movement to uproot it is still in full swing.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the fight for voting rights. This battle over who can practice their civic duty is waged by those who want to guarantee that their ideological minority will stay in power.
We see this intention laid bare in the measures Republicans introduced in Georgia, such as the elimination of voting on Sundays. This is an explicit attack on the American Black church’s longstanding tradition of supporting community members’ right to vote. The Black church has a proud history of taking congregant-filled vans to polling sites on Sundays after services, and recent events like Souls to the Polls is a direct result of this heritage.
This is the culture of participation and power within the Black community that corporations tried to attack. They went so far as to support a bill that makes it illegal to give water to voters waiting in line.
At the same time, many of us in the
state are still reeling from the senseless shooting deaths of Asian women by a white man. Georgia companies were quick to express public concern for the Asian American community in the wake of this tragedy. Meanwhile, these same companies encouraged the very legislation that will slash early voting and vote-by-mail – the voting method most preferred by the AAPI community, 85% of whom cast their ballot before election day in November in Georgia. You cannot support a community if you use your power to silence their voices.
But here’s the good news: we didn’t let them get away with it. Voters across Georgia sent 87,000+ letters to CEOs of the culprit companies demanding they change their tune. We organized, rose up and used our voices to make change. We hosted demonstrations in front of the World of Coca-Cola and put up accountability billboards across the city of Atlanta. We said enough to corporate influence on our democratic process.
The organizing worked. Several companies have now said they oppose anti-voting bills in Georgia, and the ripple effect is spilling over to other states, including Texas and Florida. Major League Baseball has announced it will no longer hold the All-Star game in Atlanta. What we as voting rights advocates hope to see is permanent and universal support for voting rights among the business community – it’s the right thing to do.
Here’s the deal: there is no place for neutrality or playing both sides in this battle. As written in Machiavelli’s The Prince: “It will be better for you to take sides and wage an honest war.” It is time corporations take a real stand and let us know just which side they’re on.
If companies in our backyard try once again to feed the inequalities of today, we will not stand for it. We refuse to bow to the cowardice of lawmakers who refuse to represent all Georgians, and we call on all major companies nationwide to use their seat at the table to push for immediate and lasting democracy reform. This includes telling congressional lawmakers to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
This is not business as usual; it’s a matter of preserving and respecting democracy.
Nsé Ufot is CEO of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) that exists to increase civic participation of the New Georgia Majority – Black, Latinx, Asian American, young, and LGBTQ+ Georgians – by building grassroots political power in support of progressive policies and issues
There is no place for neutrality or playing both sides in this battle
ish goods arriving into Northern Ireland became subject to EU customs checks for the first time. Loyalists regard themselves as British; yet now there is an official distinction between them and the country with which they identify.
This is the ineluctable logic of Brexit. Once Britain chose to be outside the single market and customs union while the Irish republic remained inside, there would always have to be a border. The only question was where. One option was a land border on the island of Ireland, once again separating north and south – which would appal nationalists. The other was a frontier in the Irish Sea, appalling unionists. Boris Johnson swore blind that he would never agree to any such thing, only to do exactly that – devising, negotiating, signing and passing into law the Northern Ireland protocol, which gives that part of the UK a separate status. The result is that loyalists feel that, once again, they have both lost out to the nationalists and been betrayed by London.
Of course, once Johnson had decided to break his own solemn pledge, loyalism and unionism were always going to be disaffected. But he has made things so much worse. Incredibly, the prime minister of the United Kingdom saw fit to do nothing at all until 9.33pm on the sixth day of unrest, when he issued a tweet calling for an end to violence. The former civil servant Tom Fletcher, who once had responsibility for Northern Ireland in Downing Street, tweeted that “there were moments when PM had to rip up grid, cancel break, let people down, stay up late, hit phones, spend, flatter, arm twist and do nothing else for week”. This, wrote Fletcher, was just such a moment. Yet Johnson is doing none of those things. What’s worse, if he did decide to get a grip, who among us thinks he would be capable of it? The patience, the diplomatic nous, the grasp of detail, the ingenuity and empathy required in such a situation – Johnson has none of them.
OK, so maybe he could delegate. Except even the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, wasn’t actually in Northern Ireland until Thursday, Lewis being the latest holder of the post to embody the government’s disregard – some might say contempt – for that part of the UK. Recall his predecessor, Karen Bradley, confessing that she had only just learned that “nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa.” An exception was the diligent Julian Smith, who naturally was sacked for insufficient fealty to Brexit.
The obligation now is to make the protocol work, to minimise the tension it causes, which will demand flexibility from both London and Brussels. But it will always be a sisyphean task, because the protocol is an adjunct of Brexit – and Brexit took a wrecking ball to the delicate mechanism that was so painstakingly assembled 23 years ago. I don’t believe Johnson and his fellow Brexiters actively sought the unravelling of peace in Northern Ireland. In a way, it is worse than that. They wereliterally careless of the heartbreak and grief that had scarred that place. They did not care.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Join a Guardian Live discussion on the growing tensions in Northern Ireland in this livestreamed event. Thursday 13 May, 7pm BST | 8pm CEST | 11am PDT | 2pm EDT. Book tickets here
“But in the beginning of the quarantine, it was really, really hard because me and my family were really tightknit and my parents wouldn’t let me over to their house for months. And so it was just like the dogs and I chilling at home and I would take them on so many walks. I think they were so sick of me because I was just so bored.”
Once loath to speak out on thorny issues, Biles has become an outspoken voice for change within USA Gymnastics. Since coming forward as a survivor of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar in 2018, she has openly criticized the national governing body for its failures in protecting and caring for its athletes. Her tweets led to the closing of the Karolyi Ranch, the place where many of the gymnasts were abused, and played a role in the resignation of USA Gymnastics president Mary Bono.
Biles, who’s also thrown her support behind the Black Lives Matter movement, spots further opportunity to leverage her global celebrity for a greater good with the USOPC announcing it will allow social justice demonstrations at the US Olympic trials, in a break with the International Olympic Committee policy.
“If you were to ask me years ago, I would say no, because I was just a little bit nervous of what Marta [Karolyi] or other people would think,” she said. “But now that I’ve kind of found my voice, I feel like not only can it benefit me, the team, and the people that are supporting and advocating for, but it kind of helps everybody and people get to see a little bit of who you are just besides an athlete and what you stand for.
“I’ve thought about it a little bit because as soon as they announced it I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we could do so much with the [leotards] a make a statement for good. So it’s been really exciting, but, it wasn’t easy to find my voice or to put it out there because it’s a little bit scary about what people are going to say. Because at the end of the day, a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, you’re an athlete.’
“But we’re not just athletes but people, too. And we have a right to speak up for what we believe in.”
Biles confirmed she plans to compete three times in the run-up to Tokyo: at the US Classic in May, the US national championships in early June and the US Olympic trials in late June. Which means she’s back in the grind of her famously rigorous training regimen at the World Champions Centre, the sprawling 56,000 sq ft gym outside Houston built by her parents as their retirement venture.
“The first practice starts at 7am and then we go to 10.30 and that starts off with warmup and conditioning,” she said. “Then we do beam and bars twice a day. And if we do vault in the morning, then we’ll do floor in the afternoon.
“At 10.30, I’ll head home and usually have a quick lunch, chicken or salmon, whatever that may be. I don’t have a crazy strict diet. I kind of eat whatever I want, just in proportion, but definitely on the leaner and healthier side.
“Then I take a shower. I try to be down from my nap at 12, wake up at 1:30, then I’m back at the gym at 2 to 5, or whenever we finish working out. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I get therapy after with our trainer here and then that’s kind of how it is. And then Thursday, we have a half day, Saturday we have a half day, so at the end of the week, it’s about 32 to 34 hours. But since we’re gearing up for competition season, we’re doing more routine work.”
Despite winning by margins that are unusually large for gymnastics, Biles keeps adding new and more difficult skills to her routines and pushing the technical limits of the sport. Lately, she’s been drilling a Yurchenko double pike vault, a technique no woman has ever thrown down in competition. Should she land it in Tokyo as planned, it will become the fifth element named for Biles in the women’s artistic gymnastics code of points.
“I know we will definitely debut it before the Olympics,” she said. “Just because we need to see, get out there and kind of control my adrenaline once I do that before the Olympics so we can perfect it in competition before that.”
It’s all the same for Biles after nearly a decade of gravity-defying supremacy. Somehow, there’s nowhere to go but up.
We’re not just athletes but people, too. And we have a right to speak up for what we believe in.