Sally Boynton Brown, the Idaho’s Democratic Party’s executive director and one of seven candidates to chair the Democratic National Committee, is taking heat for comments she made at a candidates’ forum last week on how the party should talk about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Brown, responding to a question from moderator Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC, said Democrats have failed minorities and people of color and need to “accept there is prejudice” within the party. Speaking as a “white woman” who doesn’t “get it,” she said her job was to was to “shut other white people down when they want to say, oh, no, I’m not prejudiced; I’m a Democrat.”
Right-leaning media outlets seized on the “shut other white people down” part of her comment to attack her and the party.
“Obviously they’re being taken out of context,” Boynton Brown said of the reporting on her comments Tuesday. “What I was answering to was an internal party conversation around being in alignment with our values and words.”
She added: “I think that this is the issue we see with fake news. These media outlets take something completely out of context and sensationalize it, and now people across the country are sending me hate mail and thinking I’m saying something that’s not true.”