Watch as Hillary Clinton delivers her first speech of her 2016 presidential campaign, rightly choosing this moment to discuss race and justice in America.
“We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America,” Hillary Clinton said Wednesday in her keynote address at New York City’s Columbia University. The Democratic presidential candidate spoke about America’s broken criminal justice system and delivered an impassioned plea to the nation to look at the incidents of police violence against unarmed black men in Ferguson, NYC, South Carolina, and, most recently, Baltimore.
“From Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable,” Clinton told her audience.Â
“Not only as a mother and grandmother, but as a citizen, a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families,” she said, naming several of the more prominent victims.
“We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance,” Clinton noted, as she called for accountability and body cameras on police nationwide.
“There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts,” she charged.
“When we talk about one and a half million missing African-American men, we’re talking about missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers,” the 67-year old former Secretary of State lamented, as she called for an end to mass incarceration.
The New York Times reports Clinton also “echoed her broader campaign theme of tackling income inequality. She said the protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., were indelibly linked to an economy that disproportionately favors the wealthy and she delivered a populist lament that prosperity should be measured by strengthening families and communities and not Wall Street’s measure of ‘the size of the bonuses handed out in downtown office buildings,'” a clear shot at Wall Street.
The speech is about 30 minutes but it’s important and separates her as the adult, a Democrat, in a field of Republicans. Independent Bernie Sanders is launching his campaign this week an will challenge Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
Â
Related:
Hillary Reacts To Today’s Supreme Court Session
NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio To Challenge Hillary Clinton As More Progressive Candidate: Report
‘I’m Proud Of You!’ Hillary Clinton Tells Gay Iowa Parent At Local Diner (Video)
Â
Image and Video via C-SPAN