Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton met Friday with Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson, who has made disparaging remarks about “whiteness.”
Clinton’s meeting with the protester and others at Washington’s National Council of Negro Women lasted for either one hour or ninety minutes according to competing accounts and involved her top policy advisers. Clinton offered support for shutting down private prisons and promised a more elaborate criminal-justice platform as McKesson’s group coached her in how to stop using “coded language.”
McKesson called the summit a “tough, productive, and candid meeting,” Clinton “noted that she specifically wants to focus on ending funding to private prisons as the way to end them,” McKesson said.
“We pushed Hillary Clinton to de-center the police as the key to the safety in communities. And, in the end, I think she heard us.”
“And we pushed Hillary Clinton re: using less coded language and talking more plainly & clearly about issues related to blackness,” McKesson Tweeted.
McKesson has made disparaging remarks about “whiteness.”
“Some say ‘disgruntled employee.’ Others say ‘terrorist.’ Whiteness will explain away nearly anything,” McKesson tweeted after an on-air shooting that took the lives of a local TV reporter and crew member. He deleted his tweet after it came out that the shooter was black.
McKesson recently went after former CNN host Piers Morgan’s whiteness.
“This is an exceptional example of how whiteness needs to be centered, how whiteness can’t imagine not participating,” McKesson said in response to Morgan’s assertion, “I love my whiteness and your blackness.” Morgan apparently was trying to make a point about racism.
McKesson has called the Baltimore riots an “uprising” and recently told a false story about Tamir Rice’s death while speaking at the Taft prep school.