21 Women Who Inspire Us To Make 2017 A Better Year

20. Joy-Ann Reid

Another MSNBC host, Joy-Ann Reid is attempting to reconstruct a fractured society. She’s playing a crucial role in the issue of this country’s race dilemma, actively speaking out about how it played into the Clinton vs. Trump election. She’s never been one to stray from the truth.

“I think the media has utterly failed all of you. I am an unabashed critic of my profession…policy gets thrown out the window…I think the media has to do much, much, much better. But it’s hard because the viewers tell us what they want to see. Everyone screams at me ‘why do you guys put Donald Trump on TV?’ Because y’all watch it. Because if we take him off TV, y’all change the channel. We’re responding to a marketplace that is demanding to see more circus, more shoes being thrown…the marketplace is losing its thirst for quality, and so politics is just going where everything else is going.”

But she’s also ready to fight:

“Abraham Lincoln didn’t keep a country together, he kept two countries together. We were a slave republic that disgorged slavery without having a single moment’s backward thought. We immediately turned ourselves into Captain America and forgot that the villain in these comics is also us. We can’t face our own villainy, so we can’t change. Unfortunately we had to have the first black president in order to lance the boil, to show who we were. And I think Donald Trump is sort of a good thing because it shows us who was hiding under there.”

The entirety of these excerpts can be found here.