This #MLKDay—a week after the white supremacist attack on the Capitol—I wanted to share some of Dr. King's words that’ve given me strength over the years, that helped me through my own death threats, & that inform how we should respond to the insurrection.

Re: Loving your enemies: "Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act … [but also] we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy…. We must in strength & humility meet hate with love."

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Radical love doesn’t mean accepting defeat or ignoring an evil act. It's fighting for justice with love in our hearts. That’s what brought me to become a civil rights attorney, how I responded to my own death threats, & how we must respond to white supremacist insurrection.

We must reject disingenuous calls for unity that seek to ignore the evil acts perpetrated at the capitol, calls for unity that put false labels on those evil acts, or calls for unity that seek to hide those responsible from justice and history.

But we must also rise over our raw emotions & recognize that reflexively acting on those emotions will only make matters worse. Now is not the time for retributive justice. It's time for restorative justice, for addressing the underlying causes of the crime — white supremacy.