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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. What's with all these major corporations suddenly taking a stand for voting rights? You've heard this, Major league baseball has pulled the All-Star Game from Atlanta this year and moved it to Denver because of the new Georgia law that most people believe will make it harder especially for Black people in Georgia's cities to vote. It's not just baseball and it's not just Georgia. Here is James Quincey, the CEO of Coca-Cola which is also based in Atlanta.

James Quincey: This legislation is wrong and needs to be remedied and we will continue to advocate for it both in private and now even more clearly in public.

Brian: Surprised to hear that from the head of Coca-Cola? Another battleground is Texas which is considering a package of bills that critics say will amount to voter suppression. Texas-based Dell Technologies has come out publicly against the bills, so has Texas-based American Airlines which prompted this rebuke from Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick.

Dan Patrick: Let me tell you what, Mr. American Airlines, I take it personally. You're questioning my integrity and the integrity of the governor and the integrity of the 18 Republicans who voted for this.

Brian: Actually, yes. People are questioning the integrity of politicians who seem to be responding to Donald Trump's big lie about the election being stolen by making it harder to vote in ways that expanded access and came out clean in real life. I had the opportunity last night on our national call-in program, America Are We Ready, to ask Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger about that premise.

Mr. Secretary, after the election, you were widely praised as well as mentioned before as a [unintelligible 00:01:58] really for being a Republican Secretary of State who held the truth higher than your party's interest when you reaffirmed that there was no election fraud that could have changed the outcome that Biden won the state. Now I've seen you quoted saying to NPR, for example, that the new law would restore confidence in the state's voting system.

You basically, argued after the election, that the loss of confidence in the accuracy of the vote was based on the lie from President Trump that he really won. Why would you, of all people, think any restoration of confidence is needed except through to appease a fake concern?

Brad: After the 2018 election, Stacey Abrams talked about voter suppression, and they talked about the inaccuracy and the unreliability of the old PRE voting machine, so we passed House Bill 316 and we now have new voting machines with a verifiable paper ballot trail. Hopefully, that has restored confidence on the left side of the equation. There is a verifiable paper ballot and I think it really did.

Coming out of this election, we got it from the other side this time. As many people had concerns about signature match both from the Democrat and the Republican

Party, it should be bipartisanly supported that we move now to a photo ID component which is used in both red states and blue states.

Brian: That was Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger on last night's, America Are We Ready. With me now is Rashad Robinson, President of the civil rights group, Color of Change. He's led the group for a decade now, and he has a long history of leaning on corporations to use their financial clout to promote justice and equality. An article about him in Fast Company in December said over the past year, Color of Change has further solidified its role as both lead agitator and diversity advisor for corporate America.

It led the recent campaign to demand that Facebook and other social media companies take aggressive action to rid their platforms of hate speech, pressuring hundreds of advertisers including Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Verizon to pull their money through the Beyond the Statement Campaign which launched in June. Color of Change is challenging corporate America to do more than offer empty platitudes in the wake of racial unrest.

It has targeted fast-food companies including McDonald's and Burger King along with retailers such as Nike for talking about racial justice while not paying workers a living wage. The group has gone after investment firms that release statements about equity, but also give money to police unions and foundations. That from Fast Company about Rashad Robinson last December. Rashad, it's always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Rashad Robinson: Thanks for having me, Brian. It's always great to be here.

Brian: I feel like you helped plant the seed for the corporate role in voting rights right now. For example, you came on the show back in 2016 when you were trying to get corporate sponsors of the Republican National Convention to withdraw their financial support because the nominee was Donald Trump. Would you give our listeners a one-on-one on why you've made this a focus of your work and how you see it having developed in America during your 10 years as CEO of Color of Change?

Rashad: Absolutely. Corporations play an outsize role in dictating the terms of our democracy. They've advocated to have this outsize role. Citizens United, which, in essence, made corporations almost like people in terms of speech, which allows them to have almost unlimited roles in our elections in terms of the money they can put in was because they wanted it. The outsize role that they play in putting money on both sides of the aisle, but, in essence, really, holding a lot of leverage over the Republican Party.

To the extent that corporations come to our communities every single day and say, "Buy our products or use our services", and then at night push and advocate for policies that put us in harm's way, we have to hold these corporations accountable. That's in essence what we're doing. We are engaging in the free market the same way that they do by telling them that they can't come for our money by day and take away our vote or make us safe by night.

Whether it was the work that we did to push over 100 corporations to divest from the right-wing organization ALEC because of their role in pushing discriminatory voter ID laws like the law that says you can vote with your gun license, but not your student ID like the one in Texas or their role in pushing and passing stand your ground laws around the country because Walmart put a lot of money into ALEC, and Walmart at the time was the largest seller of long guns in this country. We have done our work to hold corporations accountable.

The RNC Convention work was just another extension of that where we got over $10 million of divestment, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, a number of other corporations that left that convention as a result of our campaign. Part of this work is both the unwritten rules and the written rules of corporate engagement, but also trying to channel that energy to the policy change that will make a long-term impact on the rules of engagement that corporations can have. As we get here to this moment that we're in right now around voting rights, I think it's particularly important that we remember how corporations actually engage when they care about something.

When corporations really care about something and they want something, they don't make statements after a piece of legislation that they disagree with has been passed, they're lobbying and using their might and their power to stop it, to influence it. While I think we should appreciate statements that are speaking out against this legislation, we should not mistake presence for power. This is presence. This is corporations making a statement to make us think that they care about something, but not actually doing the things that they do when they actually do care about something.

Brian: Let me ask you about a couple of examples and where you think they fall on that scale. For example, on speaking out before, I read that in Georgia, Delta Airlines officials, Delta's base there, work with Republican lawmakers to get some of the worst proposals from the original bill taken out in the final version like banning Sunday voting which would seem like a direct attack on the Souls to the Polls Black church movement. Is that a constructive role that was a successful quiet maybe even more behind the scenes, but a corporate role in a way that we wouldn't think of a corporate role in something like this?

Rashad: Yes. I think that gets us closer. I do think that some of the softening of the legislation was important. The Georgia State Legislature and the Governor and the officials behind this legislation were able to leverage a lie at high scale for months to get us to the point where this legislation moved. Behind the scenes, these companies did a couple of things to make the bill a little less challenging. Here's the thing that I think folks should know, is that the status quo before this legislation wasn't a good status quo. The status quo before this was that Black communities waited on longer lines to vote.

That we were more likely to have broken machines in our communities, that all of the inequalities that were manufactured in terms of voting already existed and despite that, Black communities weighted on long lines, we overcame the obstacles put in our way when our political action committee was on the ground in Georgia during

both the general election and the runoff working to turn out voters in the midst of a global pandemic that disproportionately impacted the community. We saw all of the barriers that were put in the way, and yet people overcame, which is oftentimes the story that Black people have had to be part of in our democracy.

Then we get to a place where people despite having weights put on their legs win the race, and then folks say, "Okay, they won the race despite these obstacles, let's figure out how to put more manufactured obstacles in the way," and then a couple of corporations get in and say, "Hey, let's not put 20-pound weights on people's legs. Let's put 10-pound weights on people's legs." That's better than the 20-pound weights, but I do think we should really fall short of celebrating these corporations, which have for decades worked to put these legislators in office, have worked to power them to be able to lead committees and to advance this legislation.

The takeover of the Georgia Senate and legislature was backed by the corporations in that state. I am not one to give folks credit when they put up the barriers and then make them a little bit weaker, they don't get a celebration or reward for that. I think that's in essence what we're seeing here. When corporations really care about something, they speak out in powerful ways and what we'll have to see and I think what all of us will be looking at is do these corporations still donate to the state legislators that sponsored this legislation, that voted for this legislation?

We're even seeing this now as it relates to the insurrection on January 6th, where corporations spoke out in powerful ways, made very powerful statements. Now we're watching that many of those corporations that made statements that we would celebrate still donated to some of those elected officials that voted not to certify the election, that voted to put our democracy in peril. This is why it's so important that we really hold corporations accountable. It's why we don't take direct financial contributions from those corporations because it remains in many ways, untenable to fully hold them accountable while we are trying to fund our operations off of their resources.

Brian: If you're just joining us, we're talking about corporations suddenly taking public stands on voting rights, like with respect to the new law in Georgia that is seen widely as voter suppression to bills that being considered in Texas and Arizona and Michigan and elsewhere, that would do similar things. Talking about it with Rashad Robinson, CEO of the civil rights group, Color of Change.

He's been a leader for a decade now in pushing corporations to be on the right side of history. We're going to open the open up the phones. Listeners, do you work for a major corporation that has taken stands on social issues call and tell us how that looks to you. You just heard Rashad saying a little of when it's real and when it's fake and what do you want your employer to do? 646-435-7280. Any CEOs listening or other executives who've been involved with deciding when and whether to come out against state voting law changes or on any other civil rights or social justice or environmental issue? How is that decision made? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. You can tweet us as always, just tweet @BrianLehrer, we'll watch that that go by.

Rashad, there has been some pushback on the corporate pushback in Georgia on

the grounds that the wrong people will get hurt by things like moving baseball's all-star game, that it's great symbolism, but it hurts more poor and working-class Black and brown Georgians financially than any Republican lawmakers or anyone else with the authority to make change. What's your response to that concern?

Rashad: I think this is the challenging trade-off and the history of civil rights is-- The story is filled with these type of I think well-meaning differences that I think smart and well-meaning people on both sides will come down on this in different ways. As an organization, which has staked its ground on holding enablers accountable, of creating a climate where you have to pick a side and then recognizing that, that climate where we force institutions to pick a side gives us the narrative space and the political power to be able to advance the things that we want.

We oftentimes fall on the side that we at times have to create the pressure so that we can then end up with a new set of rules down the line, but I absolutely recognize the responsibility of elected officials or those who are political in the state of Georgia that are not going to tell businesses not to contribute to a state where their constituents are fighting economically.

At the same time, we have to use the right levers to fight for long-term change. I think like that's just going to be places where good people disagree and what we will see I think is over time even some of the folks that have held off on calling for things like boycotts now, like Stacey Abrams and others, they have spoken to the fact and oftentimes have used words like yet, or they're not ready to push for that yet, or have held out this idea at different times that it may come to that down the line.

I think for many of these companies, they have a chance and opportunity right now, but I do think that there's going to be folks that are going to take a more upfront approach and there's going to be folks that are going to play a more inside approach. I think that we need both of those strategies to move forward and we also need the federal strategy. The federal strategy is focused on getting HR 1 over the line which, unfortunately, will not deal with all of the challenges in the Georgia voting law, but HR 1 is incredibly important and we don't actually get to HR 1 without dealing with the filibuster.

We've got all of these complicated mix of laws and policies that we have to navigate in order to get ourselves to a place where we can express our will for a better future because that's in fact what voting is about. We can't win on the policies we care about if we can't vote and our opponents know that they can't win if we can. This has been a long-term strategy from the beginning of Black people being in this country and we can even think about more recent times.

I mentioned the work around ALEC, where we went up against the American Legislative Exchange Council for their role in the voter ID laws. We should recognize when those voter ID laws in mass start to pop up, they started to pop up after President Obama was elected and elected with an overwhelming turnout among Black folks, young people, folks of color, women, and that Obama coalition, which powered him into office was then met with a whole set of states trying to restrict that

very coalition from being able to vote.

These things are not accidents and in every single phase, we watch this line-up. Then, we watch corporations who will have flowery commercials during Black history month, or have flowery ads talking about diversity and then give money and support and resources to the very politicians and the institutions that put us in harm's way. What we believe is that you can't have it both ways, and that's just part of the organizing strategy and that's part of the power that we have to navigate in order to create the climate where it's just simply unacceptable.

Brian: Ken in Queens, you're on WNYC with Rashad Robinson. Hi, Ken.

Ken: Hi, I just wanted to thank your guest. I think he does great work, but I wanted his opinion on how I feel about it that by softening the legislation is actually detrimental because then people could defend it. If it was so egregious, by the 20-pound weights in his example, then by softening 10 pounds you could actually have-- Some people will go, "That's not that bad. They used to be five pounds before they wanted to make them four times as heavy. Now they're only twice as heavy. That's not bad."

Rashad: I think that's a good point. I think that this is why we weren't trying to soften the legislation, we wanted the legislation killed. There was no reason to restrict voting in Georgia. All of the rules around restriction were based on lies. This was Delta behind the scenes trying to get to a law that they could stomach and they backed off of their approach and then the law passes and now they're out front now saying that they're not really for it when, in fact, they helped get it over the line. I don't disagree with the fact that the softening may soften some of the outreach. At the same time, I'm also a person that has to, when it gets down to election time, turn people out to vote.

Once we get to the election day, we've got to figure out all of the mechanisms to get people to the polls despite the very real obstacles that keep being put in the way of that. It is a mixed bag, but I think what we're dealing with now is that we've got to do everything as possible to hold those accountable for what happened in Georgia and then we have to now quickly shift our interview to a set of other states where these laws are popping up Arizona, Texas, and Michigan and each of those states, Texas being a state that has slowly over time shown itself to be moving more and more progressive.

Arizona, which delivered key Senate victory for the left, and then Michigan, which is a state that has seen a tremendous rise in white nationalist violence and with a tax on the governor while also playing a critical role in the last election. The trick with Michigan that we have here, which your listeners should really be aware about is that the governor can veto the law in Michigan, but what ends up happening with their law in Michigan is that the legislature can then get it on the ballot.

The strategy for them would be trying to get on the ballot probably in 2022 to get it set up for 2024, which is the next presidential election cycle, and to then make it harder for folks in Detroit and other places to be able to vote. Once again, rooted and  

based in a lie. Whether it is the corporations who want to play both sides and want to soften the legislation, or whether it's the tape that you played from the secretary of state, which is once again, both sides, if someone was talking about the world being flat, do we have to listen to them or do we act or do we just shoot down that because we know the world is in fact not flat?

This is what we are dealing with. The folks behind these laws are trying all sorts of tactics to make it harder to vote. We have to on one hand work to fight hard to overcome these battles and on the other hand, we have to win elections so that we can actually put laws in place which expand our access to the back.

Brian: No coincidence, obviously, that these legal changes are popping up in states that are swing states, Arizona and Michigan, which you just mentioned plus Georgia all went from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. Texas, increasingly a swing state, no coincidence, obviously, that this is happening there. When we continue in a minute with Rashad Robinson. I'm going to ask him if the profit calculus has changed in his 10 years as CEO of Color of Change. Is this happening more because suddenly it's more profitable than it used to be for voting rights and other social justice that and more of your calls, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Rashad Robinson, CEO of the civil rights group, Color of Change. He's led the group for a decade now started in 2011 in that position. Congratulations on 10 years, by the way, Rashad, you've really become such a prominent force in America and people turn to you to talk about so many of the major issues first these days.

Thank you for your work and thank you for coming on the show consistently over that whole period.

Rashad: Thank you.

Brian: He has a long history of leaning on corporations to use their financial clout to promote justice and equality. We're talking about that in the context of so many corporations taking public stands, at least, against these voting law changes that would amount to voter suppression in a number of cases, major league baseball, even moving the all-star game out of Georgia, and things like that. Let's take another phone call. Olivia in Merrick on WNYC. Hi, Olivia.

Olivia: Hi, Brian. I love your show. I try to listen to you whenever I can. I'm on my break from work right now so it worked out.

Brian: Great. What's up?

Olivia: Mr. Robinson, thank you so much for all of your hard work. I wanted to just give a little praise to my company. I work for Trader Joe's, I don't know much about what they're doing in terms of public statements for voting right now, but I do know that the company is very supportive of the LGBTQ community. I do like that recently

corporate made a decision to have all of our bathrooms labeled with the triangle sign for being uni-gender or non-gender and that was something that happened fairly recently, which I was really happy to see be placed on the bathrooms.

I think that's for all the stores in the country now, and then my question was about, what do you think it would take for there to be a bill to change our national election day from a Tuesday to a weekend or to have voting be done throughout the course of a week like had this past year because of the pandemic, we all saw how well that worked, what do you think the possibility is now of that being a permanent change in the future?

Brian: Rashad, go ahead.

Rashad: Yes, I think that this is going to be part of the work. I think expanding the number of days that folks can vote, I think will be important. The idea of a Tuesday was set up at a very different time in this country, even making it a national holiday or making it a weekend means that there are a lot of folks, particularly folks of lower social-economic backgrounds that may not be able to take off a weekend or may not be able to-- That a national holiday doesn't actually mean that they're off from work.

A national holiday means that people who have office jobs may be off, but then they're going to restaurants and other places where people are working. I think expanding the number of days, having places where it's more states where we have early voting, where we have same-day registration, where we open up access for the vote.

In-person voter fraud is basically like seeing Bigfoot in this country. It's not something that we have a problem with and so to the extent that we need to use the technologies that we have to expand the vote I think it's really important. It's always good to hear someone from Long Island. I grew up in Riverhead and that's where my family is and that's home for me, so I appreciate you calling from Merrick.

Brian: Go ahead.

Olivia: Maybe I'll see you at the aquarium.

Brian: Olivia, thank you so much. Please call us again. All right. Rashad, since you said that I'm going to take another call from Long Island. Here's Camille in Roslyn, who wants to spotlight one provision of the Georgia law. Camille, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Camille: Thank you for having me. First of all, thank you again for all the hard work you do, we will be donating to your organization. I was not aware of it, but a previous caller mentioned about softening some of the legislation 20-pound weight. The 500-pound weight to me doesn't get mentioned very often. The fact that I do believe voters can overcome all the obstacles that Georgia and all these other swing states are placing in their way, but what about the fact that the legislatures, the Republican-held legislatures, can just overturn the results of the election and choose the voter they want.

Brian: Choose the candidate that they want. Rashad, would you talk about that? When we did the national show last night with Brad Raffensperger and others, this is what a lot of callers wanted to talk about there too. That this provision of the law, even though most of the media attention has been on, you can't bring water to somebody waiting in line to vote, that this is really the 500-pound gorilla or whatever the analogy is that the legislature would have more power to overturn the result of the vote. Is that your understanding of the Georgia law?

Rashad: Absolutely. That is how the law is constructed and based off of what happened in 2020. We have every reason to believe that this will be the new normal in elections around the country if these type of laws are allowed to be in place. Where politicians rather than going out and trying to convince voters to vote for them, will go out and pick which voters actually get their votes counted. That's in essence what we're dealing with.

You're absolutely right that this is one of the scariest provisions for our democracy, it really does speak to a huge overreach in terms of legislature and given all the ways in which we've seen state legislatures like Georgia and others attach themselves to outright lies, to things that are not based in fact, we have to really worry about the incentive structure behind folks getting behind being able to undermine elections. Brian, you brought up something earlier around the profit structure of what's happening right now as it relates to corporations and how they make the decisions.

I think that was such an important point because I want to just address it quickly and that it's become complicated because corporations made a lot of statements last summer about Black Lives Matter, Color of Change, which does not take money directly from corporations turned down nearly $12 million of corporate money. I would wake up each morning and see these statements from corporations that we've run campaigns against, or we've been waiting to hear back from on-demand saying that they were giving us money and it just felt confusing, but all that to say we bumped up our demands in those moments, but what happens here.

This is the trick that corporations play because, yes, on one hand, they are making these statements because a movement has pushed and changed the context of these conversations. Employees are making demands on their corporations. We heard an employee talk about the changes that her company is making and employees are more and more likely to push on their companies. At the same time, the reason why organizations and particularly secretive organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, are so important because corporations want to do this work behind the scenes.

Here's the thing that's important is that they know when they elect these right-wing legislators, they're going to go into office and pass tax policy that will ensure these corporations don't have to pay their fair share, that they get all of the goodies and the deals out of operating inside of America without having to pay into America. That's why you see corporations, then going back and trying to get awards for donating money to schools for charity, where if they just paid their fair share of taxes, they wouldn't have to actually donate. In the end, they can pay less taxes. They can

create monopolies around their products so we don't have as many choices in the marketplace.

Then they can put out statements of diversity saying that they're outraged by politicians who advance policies that put our communities in harm's way, all while under the surface, they have put those very politicians in office and they are doing the wink and the nod at those politicians to stay in office because they know if those politicians stay in office, they're going to even while they might be getting hit by those politicians for some of the social laws, they're going to continue to advance policies that make it easier for those companies to make tremendous amounts of profits without paying their fair share.

The only way they can continue to do that is by shrinking the number of people that can actually vote because when we can all vote, we will actually get policies. We will actually get accountability on corporations. We will actually get more equitable economic practices in this country. This game that gets played is really important for us to recognize. This is why holding corporations accountable is so incredibly important. This is why these corporations are engaging in that work to change the demographics of who gets to vote because the actual demographics of who is American and who gets to vote has changed.

This summer, over the summer, last summer, racial justice became a majoritarian issue. In the poles, in the upticks in voter registration, in the multiracial groups of people that took to the streets. When so many people thought the best we could do in terms of protests was clap outside of our windows or uplift investigative journalism, it was racial justice that got people of all races speaking up, demanding more from their companies.

Now that racial justice is a majoritarian issue. They're going to be-- Those in power, they're going to do everything they can to prevent it from being a governing majority because when something is a majoritarian issue, the next step is making a governing majority. Whether we see it on voting, whether we see it on criminal justice, whether we see it on guns, when schools of white children get shot up and we have no progress on gun laws, even when the racial dynamics would mean that you think we would get it in this country.

What we know is that at every time we have those in power that want to prevent the majority's will from actually being the governing majority. That is what this is all about. That is why it's so important that we fight because so much is at stake to making sure our democracy actually works.

Brian: Here's one more exchange I had with Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger last night after he supported the provision in the Georgia law that requires a photo ID. If there is no meaningful amount of ID fraud that needs to be corrected from 2020, then why isn't this just throwing up an obstacle to voting for the state's more economically marginalized citizens who are less likely to have those IDs?

Brad: 97% of all voters have a driver's license already. The other 2.7% have social

security numbers, which is another form of identification. For the remainder of 0.3% of voters that wouldn't have anything, they will be issued upon application. We'll send them a free state-issued ID, but that also then becomes very objective standards. It's something that's being used right now in Minnesota. The Democrat party in Minnesota actually loves it.

Brian: Rashad, there was dispute after he said that about Minnesota requiring a photo ID. We had callers from Minnesota who said, "No, you are not required to have a photo ID to vote." Then secretary Raffensperger's office got back in touch with us and said, "Yes, you have to have at least an ID number or a social security number." Are you familiar with Minnesota in this respect?

Rashad: Yes, I'm familiar with Minnesota mostly because I was involved in defeating the ballot measure. It was the same year there was a ballot measure that was focused against the LGBT community. It was a ballot measure to put voter ID laws on the books. The racial justice movements and the LGBT movements came together in Minnesota and defeated both of those ballot measures together and folks like now Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was a Congressman at the time and Senator Amy Klobuchar, others were important as well as the grassroots movements.

I don't actually know what the secretary of state is talking about. It's unfortunate because every time I hear elected officials from Georgia talking, it makes me more and more concerned about their ability to run anything, let alone their own offices. What we've got here is folks that will say anything to get these laws passed. To the extent that even his numbers around IDs, this is the trick that they're trying to play with us because what they also know is that at a certain point, people who are elderly stopped getting their IDs renewed.

Folks that have moved and then people who are economically disadvantaged are oftentimes more likely to move and so addresses might not match. His numbers actually don't line up with reality and the rules around ID and just like Black people are 20% more likely to be stopped by police, what we know is that Black folks are more likely to have their IDs challenged in a state like Georgia and in other states throughout the South where voter ID laws have been put in place.

Just for folks to know is that his answer might seem completely plausible on its face, but the only reason why they are advancing this law, the only reason why they're fighting for this law is because they've done the math. What they've realized is that they can cut off a whole set of eligible voters who will not vote for them. This is sort of the trick. If you can't win by the rules, change the rules. This has been the history of how Black people have had to fight for our right to vote.

What we should recognize is that they will say anything right now to hold on to political power as the tides have changed. It's not just powered by Black voters. Black voters have been important, but it's powered by Latino and Asian voters. It's been powered by progressive white voters in that state and an increasingly number of moderate voters in that state who are rejecting the sort of outright racism, the

outright misogyny that has come from the state Capitol. This multiracial coalition is important.

Brian: We're almost out of time, but people who followed the post-election shenanigans of Trump, might be thinking, "Brad Raffensperger really was a moral actor," and against great pressure from members of his own party to stand up and affirm the real outcome in Georgia, so do you want to really cast aspersions on him as just trying to make it harder for Black people to vote?

Rashad: Look, I can give people their praise for when they do the right thing and we also hold people accountable when they don't. If anyone has followed the work of Color of Change, they know that I have run campaigns targeting and holding accountable Black elected officials who I may agree with on a lot of things and sometimes feel like the issues that they're standing up for are opposed. That's what it means to represent a constituency and to not be bought or bossed by those in power.

As it relates to the Georgia Secretary of State, there were a whole set of things that he did up until the point of the election to make it harder for Black people to vote. There were all sorts of reasons why the lines were longer in Black communities and so many things happened. After it was all done, he ended up getting attacked. In so many ways he was defending himself. He was defending the outrage that he had done everything he possibly could. He even admitted that him and his family were Trump supporters, they were Trump supporters after everything that Trump had said, and everything that Trump had done.

We should be careful about who we give parades to and recognize that sometimes folks may actually-- I guess this is old saying that a broken clock can be right twice a day and I think that that's what we should recognize here. It does not mean that we don't give appreciation when someone does the right thing, but I don't think we need to make those statements global unless they actually are deserving.

Brian: Rashad Robinson, President of Color of Change. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Rashad: Thanks for having me.

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