Run, Stacey, Run!

*CLICK*

Every part of Rebecca Traister's Stacey Abrams profile is FUCKING DELIGHTFUL. What shall we excerpt? How about this?

It was, perhaps, particularly awful for a black girl in a predominantly white elementary school in Mississippi. "Stacey may have read on the same level as the teachers," her sister Leslie recalls. "And she wasn't shy about correcting you. She was never rude, but she'd say, 'This is silly.' It was: 'What is the purpose of this finger paint? When I go home I'm reading Nancy Drew. So why am I reading Dick and Jane at school?' " Leslie laughs. "But you couldn't punish her for being smart! And she wasn't a bad child. So the teachers were like: 'Will you go do something useful then? Go make copies!' Stacey made a lot of copies." That meant she spent a lot of time with adults, like her principal, and less time with her peers, whom she studied with a kind of distant curiosity.

"I was born trying to figure out why other kids were just playing in a circle," Abrams says. " What are you doing in the circle? Duck, Duck, Goose? What is the goose supposed to do? You could be organizing; you could be producing products that are for sale. You have a circle, but how are you utilizing it? "

As an adult, Abrams made a conscious decision not to hide her braininess, unlike so many extremely smart women who've been told that their intellectual prowess is off-putting and unattractive. She knows the perceived costs of this. In her book, she writes about how "older women of every racial category" blame the fact that she is single on her achievements, while men cite her "tendency toward strong opinions" as a romantic turnoff. (In our first conversation, back in 2015, she told me, "I like to be successful at things, and I was not good at dating and so I just stopped," one of the most deeply human observations I've ever heard come out of the mouth of a politician. Four years later, she says she is very open to the possibility of a relationship.)

Go on, now, CLICK!