Candidates aspiring to take over as
chairman of the Democratic National Committee met Monday night to discuss what
went wrong in 2016 and how to get the party back on track.
Early
into the event the candidates gravitated toward a particular scapegoat for the
party’s poor showing in November: Political consultancies owned by white
people.
“We
have to stop, particularly with the consultants,” said the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party,
Jaime Harrison. “You cannot come to the DNC and get a contract and the only
minority face you have is the person answering the phone.”
Minority
consultants “need to get the same resources that the white consultants have
gotten,” said a Fox News analyst and candidate for the chairmanship, Jehmu
Greene. "The DNC did a piss poor, pathetic job" attracting
minorities, she said.
Democrats
must provide “training” that focuses in part on teaching Americans “how to be
sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white,” urged the executive director of Idaho’s Democratic Party, Sally
Boynton Brown, who is white.
The
event’s moderator, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid, asked the candidates how the party
should handle the Black Lives Now movement.
The
candidates uniformly emphasized that the party must embrace the activists
unreservedly.
“It
makes me sad that we’re even having that conversation and that tells me that
white leaders in our party have failed,” Brown said. “I’m a white woman, I
don’t get it. … My job is to listen and be a voice and shut other white people
down when they want to interrupt.”
“This
is life and death” she emphasized. “I am a human being trying to do good work
and I can’t do it without y’all. So please, please, please, get ahold of me.
Sally at we-the-dnc.org. I need schooling so I can go school the other white
people.”
Another
candidate said black Americans are now living with “justified fear” of being
killed after Donald Trump was elected president.
Raymond
Buckley, the chairman for the New Hampshire Democratic Party, told a story about how, in the midst of “grieving” on Election Day,
he received a call from his black niece, who feared for her life after Trump’s
victory.
“It’s
not just certain parts of the country,” he said. “That fear is all across the
country. It’s even in rural new Hampshire. So when people say black lives
matter, you are damn right they matter.”
Asked
whether they would agree to work with President Trump, the candidates agreed they would never do so, which
drew some applause from the otherwise quiet crowd at George Washington
University.
