It Is MLK Day. Do Not Despair. This Year Especially, We Have Work To Do.

With delicious anticipation, we imagined it. The first Black woman president, being sworn into office by the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice on Martin Luther King Day. It was a very particular, powerful, vindicating dream. Especially for “the 92%,” especially - the Black women who had worked hard, stood ten-toes-down for democracy, demanding to be seen – flexing our economic and organizing power over decades to arrive at this moment – there was to be sweet satisfaction in the confirmation of our ascendant political power.

But this was not meant to be. In what seems a cruel irony – the candidate who, in his racism, his misogyny, his rapacious cruelty and indecency, stands for everything we have stood and worked against – will instead be inaugurated as President on King Day this year. The disappointment, the insult even, feels profound and bitter for tens of millions of Americans who believed that voters in this country would turn resoundingly away from fascism and towards democracy.

Rather than focusing on the disappointment, I have come to another way of looking at where this country finds itself on Martin Luther King Day 2025. In fact, I have come to see how critical it is for us to prove, this year especially, that we have truly absorbed the work and words of Dr. King. King Day always calls on us to challenge ourselves and our country, and this year is no different. In fact this year demands that we honor Dr. King’s work and his unceasing belief and demand that we do the work of confronting the truth that lies at the heart of this country and the truth of our own hearts, as prerequisites to building and sustaining a nation that would resemble “the beloved community.”

The dream of the historic inauguration so many of us imagined today would have truly been a dream. But dreams are for those who have the luxury of sound sleep. The work of democracy building is fueled by snatches of rest and oblivion. We must be ever watchful.

The dream we imagined for this day might have lulled our country into a deeper slumber. It may have encouraged us to believe that the disease so deeply encoded in America’s DNA could be overcome without the kind of reckoning and confrontation with truth that Dr. King so powerfully demanded of this country more than 50 years ago. We might have lied to ourselves and allowed too many of our allies – those who insist that it is not “strategic” to talk about racism and misogyny too much, those who continue to insist that it is really “class not race” despite all evidence to the contrary[1] (and as though the two are not fundamentally entwined)[2] - to dominate public discourse with a watered-down narrative of reconciliation. Those who are always anxious to absolve our country of a past it has never truly confronted, and those who refuse to accept that the work of holding at bay the dangers of white supremacy lies at the core of democracy work in this country, might have guided our country away from seeing that any victory would be short-lived.

We would have heard encomiums to “Dr. King’s dream” on that day and consistently throughout the Harris presidency. His work – devoted to the transformation of this country – would have been pronounced as completed by far too many, even as racism and sexism would be on full display on Capitol Hill, online, in our streets, in newsrooms, and in pulpits across America, to block the first woman and first Black woman president from implementing her agenda. And all of this would have been minimized in favor of a narrative that President Harris’ election shows that we have “overcome” race, just as Barack Obama’s presidency was foolishly said by some to demonstrate that we are “post-racial.”

Maybe this terrible thing that has befallen this country, this descent into fascism and oligarchy invites us to a more honest confrontation with the truth about the state of our democracy. Dr. King warned us. He feared that Black Americans were seeking to “integrate into a burning house.” Had President Harris been inaugurated, we would we have been lulled into believing that the house of our democracy was safe? Would we have imagined that we could fix what ails our country without the painful process of confrontation and repair to which Dr. King called us?

To be clear, I am devastated by the election of Donald Trump. There is no upside to it. This is as dangerous a moment in this country’s history as on the eve of the Civil War. It is, of course not only Trump. It is a supine and collaborating Republican Party, and a shockingly degraded Supreme Court, which leaves our democracy so completely undefended.

But this is the hand we have been dealt. And perhaps now and only now, this country can confront honestly the nature of its mythologies, and the depth of its pathologies. To love this country and to work to strengthen it requires first a proper diagnosis of the weaknesses that lie at its core. We cannot protect against that which we refuse to diagnose and name.

Perhaps more people in this country will begin to understand what Dr. King knew. That this country’s continued accommodation of white supremacist ideology has allowed a cancer to eat away the foundations of our democracy. The result is this country’s inability to sustain policies that any healthy democracy needs to protect itself.

Democracy is not just dependent on elections and legislation. Healthy democracy requires attention to the needs of the people. All of its people. Representative democracy – a system of give and take in which you cannot guarantee that every battle will be won, requires empathy and compassion, and a set of baseline values that protect the dignity and humanity of its people.

That is why we can best diagnose the health of our democracy by paying attention to those who suffer most from its failures. We know, for example, that our democracy is unhealthy by the inhumanity of conditions in our prisons. In a healthy democracy citizens have a right to expect that they will not be killed with impunity by agents of the state. Yet police killings of unarmed Black people continue unabated. In a healthy democracy citizens enjoy bodily integrity and cannot be compelled to surrender their bodies to the will of the state. Healthy democracy requires an equitable and fair allocation of resources and contribution of taxes. To sustain a healthy democracy requires citizens who have been prepared by their education system and by media sources with accurate information and the skills needed to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship.

We cannot have healthy democracy when an imperial Supreme Court exercises ever-increasing power without ethical guardrails in place. A healthy democracy is one in which the criminal justice system more often than not produces just results and values the humanity of those its equitably applied rules compel it to punish. There cannot be healthy democracy when religious zealots co-opt our public education system and our libraries, and the decisions we make about whether to expand or how to raise our families.

By all of these measures America is not, and perhaps never has been, a healthy democracy. This would have been true even if Vice President Harris had been elected President, just as it was true despite the election of President Obama. America will never be a true, strong, enduring, and healthy democracy until we show the courage needed to confront and address our most painful truths. And so I suggest that this moment, this King Day, must be one of confrontation and reckoning with truth.

Dr. King warned us not to fear the tension of the times. Instead Dr. King explained that those of us pressing for change do not create tension, they simply “bring tension to the surface.” King advised that “[t]his tension… must not be seen as destructive.” Instead King explained, “there is a kind of tension that is both healthy and necessary for growth…. to force [our society’s] citizens to confront the ugliness of their prejudices and the tragedy of their racism.”[3] Trump’s election has surfaced the persistent, ugly, stubborn hold that white supremacist ideology has on our country, and its power to utterly destroy any claim to democracy this country may have.

I believe I hear Dr. King calling us this King Day. I hear him demanding that we find a way to turn what the election of Trump has exposed about our country into a commitment to build the foundation of a healthy democracy in this country. But we cannot build a healthy democracy until we all face the truth – not just about our opponents, but about ourselves.

So this Martin Luther King Day is one in which we should focus on reckoning - confronting those things we have tried to avoid, and those things we’ve gotten terribly wrong. Beginning with ourselves. I will start. I confess that I foolishly believed in a pace of change that virtually guaranteed failure. I failed to see that in some matters, speed is more important than deliberation. I am trained as a lawyer. This is both a blessing and a curse. I wish now, that in my sphere of influence I had moved faster and with a bit more aggressive and even reckless determination than care. I regret every hesitation and diplomatic hedge when forthright demand was required. Law can never be a legitimate cover for the failed tactic of incrementalism.

Perhaps you wish to confront your own mistakes or blind spots. Perhaps you are an elder, who disrespected the moral certainty of young people and discredited the vital element that young people bring to every movement for justice – impatience. Perhaps as a young person you found yourself drifting into nihilism to avoid the difficulty of the work or found yourself becoming hard and inflexible. Or are you a more seasoned leader who focused your efforts deliberately on the low-hanging fruit of championing “diversity,” because it was more palatable than the real, transformative change you knew the most disadvantaged in your communities really need?

Perhaps you are a Republican Never Trumper who is finally prepared to openly admit that your party’s embrace of racism has for decades, prepared the soil for Trump.

Maybe you worshipped tech, and refused to listen to those who warned about hate speech, misogyny, and racism in the field and on the platforms created,[4] and so you missed that these were indicators of a deep and sinister truth about the most successful platforms and their owners.

Are you a journalist who, on this King Day, is ready to confront your own complicity in normalizing Trump? Are you ready to confront the stories you wrote in which you pulled your punches, made sense of Trump’s nonsense, or tamped down the warning signs that should have been reported with unequivocal clarity?

Are you among those influential lawyers who believed that women lawyers were being overwrought when they predicted that overturning Roe v. Wade was a priority agenda item for the elite conservative bar, and so you tamped down their concerns? Have you discounted the role of Christian fundamentalism in unraveling democracy in this country? Indeed, maybe you are a faith leader who walked with and enjoyed walking in the reflected limelight of some of the most famous and wealthy of those fundamentalist leaders.

Do you harbor the belief that although you are descended from immigrants, or are an immigrant yourself, you are better and more legitimately deserving of protection and respect than those who desperately traversed the Darien Gap or crossed the Rio Grande?

We must build unity among ourselves if we are to effectively battle the forces arrayed against us. It will be difficult. A big tent under which a diverse coalition of democracy fighters work together will always be more difficult to anchor than a tent under which a lockstep, authoritarian-led army of religious or power-hungry zealots coalesce. And racism and xenophobia are powerful unifiers.

But this is the work we who believe in democracy are called to do.

In the days ahead it will appear that they are winning, and we are losing. But if we use this opportunity to go deeper, to deal with the roots of our problems and national dysfunction, then we will be playing the long game - chess, not checkers.

So I for one will not be watching the inauguration this year. It is the first inauguration I will not have watched since 1972, when I was a child. I will focus on the work of honest confrontation to which Dr. King devoted his life. Service work is important. But let us also use this day to begin the process of reckoning – of facing our own contributions to this moment as a step towards doing the national reckoning work that must come ahead of our ability to build a strong, enduring, healthy democracy.

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[1] Studies now clearly demonstrate that a majority of white Americans supporting Donald Trump were motivated more by anxiety about the loss of power they anticipated would follow from demographic changes in our country, rather the “economic anxiety” that so many media commentators insisted was behind support for Donald Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html ; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/17/racism-motivated-trump-voters-more-than-authoritarianism-or-income-inequality/ ; https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/16/17980820/trump-obama-2016-race-racism-class-economy-2018-midterm

[2] David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of American Working Class (Verso 1991).

[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” (1967).

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/women-warnings-ai-danger-risk-before-chatgpt-1234804367/ ; https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/how-i-m-fighting-bias-in-algorithms/ ; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/technology/artificial-intelligence-google-bias.html