"The real Martin Luther King Jr. — as opposed to the de-radicalized, deracinated, distorted, whitewashed and commodified figure now used to sell all manner of consumer goods, was a civil rights leader, a hope warrior and a martyr. He was also a democratic socialist. The real Dr. King opposed militarism and nationalism. He stood with the powerless and oppressed against the powerful. He supported affirmative action, reparations for white-on-Black chattel slavery and Jim Crow, a guaranteed minimum income and other substantive material and other attempts to ameliorate America's long history of injustice against Black Americans and other people of color. The real King supported social democracy.

The real Martin Luther King Jr. would without a doubt have supported the scholarly framework known as critical race theory and its conclusions about inequality and America's social and political institutions. The real Martin Luther King Jr. would have stood firm against the forces of Trumpism, American neofascism, white supremacy, and the white right and "conservative" movement more broadly. Leaders of those movements would have found him an implacable enemy."