Multiculturalism, we use this so loosely that we don't even know what it means anymore.

Well, Douglas knew what it meant.

It meant the dream, put into reality, that people of every kind of creed, every kind of

race, background, ethnicity, difference.

Even though they're going to fight it out, they're going to fight like hell over resources

and meaning and religion and interpretations.

They're going to fight like hell.

But it's possible to create a democracy in which all of them can actually live.

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.

Once again, we are here in the quarantine closet, however many weeks we are into the COVID

quarantine.

And there's been a lot of discussion about reckoning with our past, reckoning with our

history.

We've seen these protesters in city to city tearing down Confederate monuments, many of

which, if not most of which, are actually not erected in the period of the Confederacy

where after the Civil War, it would be a weird thing to do right after you lost.

They're erected, they tend to be erected in the late 19th century into the 1920s and

1930s, even sometimes in the wake of Brown v. Board of Ed, as essentially contemporaneous

statements of white supremacy and domination over free black citizens.

And so what we've seen in these battles is that these sort of totems and statues and

symbols have real political power and they are often erected as moments of political expression.

And there's also been this kind of debate that they have occasioned about which figures

...