Heather McGee

And its economic fortunes turned around because of the cross-racial solidarity that many white Mainers learned to have to rely on to be able to revive the town of Lewiston, Maine.

It's such a good question.

As I've traveled across the country, I've learned a few things.

One, there is no substitute for organizing.

And what does organizing really mean?

We're seeing it happen all over the country right now.

people who never considered themselves activists, who are feeling their moral sense be activated by the threat to their neighbors, by the terrifying sight of armed, masked men patrolling outside of schools.

I'm talking about school teachers, hairdressers, neighbors who have said, I'm going to get on a WhatsApp or a signal thread with my neighbors, and suddenly I know hundreds of people saying,

And we have, over the course of a week, figured out how to protect the people in our community, how to take time to bring resources to a family that is afraid to leave their house because four of them are U.S.

citizens, but one of them is not.

Those are the kinds of...

fundamental kind of activations of the very idea of citizenship.

And I'm not talking about your status and your documentation.

I'm talking about your willingness to be a neighbor, to be a participant in your community.

That skill of being open to and also being able to connect with people in your community in pursuit of a common goal, that's organizing.

There have been moments in our country when organizing was at an all-time high, when a quarter of the population participated in some kind of protest.

We are getting back to that kind of era right now.

And I just want to say that the exact opposite happens.

of the us versus them rhetoric, the zero-sum lie, is something that Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King talked about, which is the beloved community.

That was the promised land.