Sen. Elizabeth Warren gave the December commencement speech at Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, on Friday, and told graduates that the system is "rigged" — particularly for minority communities and people of color.
“I’m not a person of color," Warren said during the speech. "And I haven’t lived your life or experienced anything like the subtle prejudice, or more overt harm, that you may have experienced just because of the color of your skin. Rules matter, and our government — not just individuals within the government, but the government itself — has systematically discriminated against black people in this country.”
But was she the wrong voice to speak that message?
“Wrong audience, wrong time, wrong way, wrong matter,” Reverend Emmett Price III said in an interview with Boston Public Radio Monday. “You don’t go to an HBCU in the height of a [racial] crises … and try to come off as the great Intellect.”
Price and Reverend Irene Monroe joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio for their weekly All Revved Up segment to discuss Warren’s speech.
“She’s an opportunist,” Monroe said. “She’s pimping, and this is how she’s pimping: She’s using a black optic to subvert attention away from how she really botched the Native American narrative.”
