Hillary Clinton cant help you if youre not asking for specific solutions.
Hillary Clinton can't help you if you're not asking for specific solutions. JStone / Shutterstock.com

On Monday, Black Lives Matter released video of their conversation with Hillary Clinton, which they had following a town hall meeting last week in New Hampshire. Part two of the edited video shows Clinton as a kind of defensive, interrupting politician who's trying to assert control of the conversation. The Clinton campaign thought the video misrepresented the candidate, and so released a transcript of the full conversation.

The transcript makes it seem as if the video was cut to highlight Clinton's more emotional responses to the questioners, which seems unfair only in that it doesn't show her build-up to that anger. However, the cuts seem fair because, too, because the two parties never really move past the premise of the first question.

Here's the first question:

Both Julius Jones and Daunasia Yancey, heads of Black Lives Matter chapters based in Massachusetts, ask her to personally reflect, to speak from the heart and admit that she promoted policies that ultimately led to the death of people of color. Yancey specifically mentions Clinton's support of the War on Drugs, and other "Health and Human Services disasters in impoverished communities of color." Clinton dodges, bobs, and weaves, trying to recontextualize their critique by saying, "I do think there was a different set of concerns back in the '80s and early '90s. And now I believe that we have to look at the world as it is today and try and figure out what will work now."

The two parties keep talking past each other throughout the rest of the video because Clinton won't accept the terms of BLM's argument. Jones and Yancey want to hold Hillary accountable, which, for BLM, seems to mean that she must admit what they perceive as her past wrongdoings and then apologize. If this premise sounds familiar, it's because it's the same one Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford began with when they interrupted Bernie at Westlake Park last weekend. Aside from wanting to mourn the death of Michael Brown, they wanted Sanders to apologize for speaking over members of BLM who interrupted him at Netroots Nation.

"Your analysis is totally fair. It's historically fair, it's psychologically fair, it's economically fair," Clinton tells them. "But you're going to have to come together as a movement and say, 'Here's what we want done about it.' Because you can get lip service from as many white people as you can pack into Yankee stadium."

In the second video, Clinton's hackles are raised, admittedly only at half staff:

Apologizing for perpetuating white supremacy is more than off-brand for Clinton. Judging from her reaction, BLM's request to reflect publicly and apologize just does not compute for her. Clinton's power as a presidential candidate, she believes, lies in her ability to advocate for specific issues. She's an advocacy machine. If you don't want her to advocate for a specific group of issues that "she can sell," as she says in the video, she doesn't know how to help you. That BLM didn't want solutions from her at that moment frustrated her.

Drawing this reaction from Hillary was seen as a small victory by Jones. In an interview with DemocracyNOW! this morning, he said he was glad that the group clearly got to her. "Her visceral reaction is indicative of how she felt, and indicative of her own racial introspective. I don't think it ever occurred to her like that."