Tonight you can watch Democracy in Color's DNC chair candidate forum at 7:25 PM ET/4:25 PM PT at this link. Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley, South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison, Idaho Democratic Party Executive Director Sally Boynton Brown, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, political analyst Jehmu Greene, and former Secretary of Labor Tom Perez all plan to attend.
Steve Phillips, who helped organize the forum, said the event would focus on finding a leader who could "build power and win elections in a highly racially charged environment” going forward.
First and foremost, the Democratic Party must be race-conscious and not be race-neutral or color-blind. This flies in the face of much contemporary liberal orthodoxy, but the hard truth of the matter is that a color-blind approach does not work in a country still seared by contemporary racial inequality, discrimination, and oppression.
There has been a lot of talk since the election about whether the Democratic Party should target disaffected white workers or people of color (we’ll set aside for the moment the fact that people of color are pretty disaffected too, and most non-disaffected whites also voted for Trump). The larger point that this argument and false dichotomy misses is that we need to speak to the racial realities of the entire American electorate—the fears of most whites and the hopes and dreams of people of color and progressive whites.