Heather McGee

folks who are holding on white-knuckled to a tiny idea of we the people.

And they're denying the beauty of what we are becoming as we become a country with no dominant racial majority, as we become a country that has

owned up to and understood our true history.

People don't unsee what they saw in the summer of the uprisings in the wake of George Floyd's murder.

People don't unsee what they saw when ICE killed Renee Good.

This is a country that is in fact, just as it has always been,

warring between a faction that wants to keep wealth and power concentrated in its hands and a diverse, striving, agitating, often activist, multiracial population that is trying to figure out who they are to one another.

But I think that the reason why the attacks have been so brutal and overreaching is

is because we are so close to a place where there is an enduring multiracial governing majority that wants this country to live up to the values that we were taught it was founded on and is ready to do the work to actually make it so.

I'm sorry, Tanya, you saying that was just very moving.

Because I pictured myself getting a chance to be with him, and that's a powerful thing.

Dr. King, in his very short time on this planet, gave us so much and was such a prophet.

I don't think he would be surprised...

about where we are because he was a student of history and he knew that the arc of the moral universe was long and that it bends towards justice, but he also knew that it snaps back sometimes.

And he also knew that the very narrow, self-interested elite was always going to try to sabotage progress.

I think he would be proud of who black people are today and what we've accomplished, what we've contributed to the world.

I think he would be disgusted by the enduring inequalities in our society that have grown so much since his time.

But so much of what he spoke about was so prescient that

He began in the later part of his activism to really focus on the ills of capitalism and the ills of militarism, racial and economic inequality.

And of course, those ills are very much at the heart of what is plaguing us in our society today.