A video released Monday night showed Hillary Clinton meeting privately with Black Lives Matter representatives from Massachusetts last week, and telling activists that change would come through changing the system, not changing hearts.
The videos were released by GOOD Magazine after activists Daunasia Yancey and Julius Jones appeared on MSNBC on Monday night.
The videos were filmed during a closed-door meeting following a campaign stop in New Hampshire last week, New York magazine reported early Tuesday.
At first, Clinton gave a fairly canned response, citing her work with the Children’s Defense Fund. She seemed to chastise the activists’ questions and dodged the question about her and former President Bill Clinton’s role in the rise of mass incarceration.
“You’re going to have to come together as a movement and say, ‘Here’s what we want done about it,'” Clinton said to the activists in the video. “You can get lip service from as many white people as you can pack into Yankee Stadium and a million more like it.”
But when an activist called her response “victim blaming,” Clinton had an incredibly candid response:
Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not gonna change every heart. You’re not. But at the end of the day we can do a whole lot to change some hearts and change some systems and create more opportunities for people who deserve to have them to live up to their own God-given potential … You can keep the movement going, which you have started, and through it you may actually change some hearts. But if that’s all that happens, we’ll be back here in 10 years having the same conversation.
Watch first video below:
And here is the second video of the exchange:
