On Friday's MSNBC Live, as host Ali Velshi brought aboard Black Lives Matter leader Deray McKesson to discuss the controversial Nike ad featuring Colin Kaepernick, the MSNBC host actually hit his liberal guest from the left as he wondered if Nike was really doing enough to promote Kaepernick's political agenda.
Opening the interview at 3:36 p.m. Eastern, he referred to a segment he heard on NPR and posed:
I was surprised at the response of some people who say that this is a cleansed version of the story -- that if you really wanted to feature Colin Kaepernick and his struggle and his fight, you'd really talk about the underlying issues that he's complaining about as opposed to just glorifying Colin Kaepernick. What's your take on that?
After McKesson was upbeat about the fact that Nike was elevating Kaepernick, Velshi was unconvinced as he followed up:
Right, so this is what I'm trying to get at, that if you want to be corporate America and capitalize to some degree on this sort of thing -- and some of it's capitalizing and some of it is Nike has decided that its audience respects this sort of thing.
We know millennials like to support companies to support causes, but, in doing so, people who aren't following Colin Kaepernick or the story will have Googled it and figured out what he was protesting, and they might get deeper into these issues, and it might promote people to back the cause. You think it's better -- more good than bad?
As the segment came to a close, after McKesson referred to the U.S. having "race problems," Velshi proclaimed that Kaepernick's kneeling protest would some day be remembered as "one of the most powerful" in the country's history:
DERAY MCKESSON, BLACK LIVES MATTER: You don't need Colin to say that the country was born of a racist past and that it still has race problems. We can all say that. We don't need him to be the mascot for that in interviews. He's already used his platform to say that.
ALI VELSHI: Right. That taking the knee will one day -- whether you like it or not -- will be noted to be one of the most powerful protests that this country has ever seen.
