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Now, welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with clips today from Melissa Harris

Perry, this week in Blackness, citizen radio, J. Smooth, and the majority report.

There's also the surprise emergence of a narrative that Republican and Democratic candidates

will have to contend with, like it or not, race. And not just in the ways we've come,

we've become accustomed to talking about race during elections. This isn't race as a thinly

veiled dog whistle or race as a talking point after a candidate's gaff. And this isn't race as

part of the Obama-era political analysis. Now, this is the expectation that candidates running

for the American presidency should have a meaningful policy response to systemic racism

and the demand for racial justice. And it's demand that has been most clearly, consistently,

and emphatically directed to the candidates by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Now, even before the summer of Democratic candidate disruptions, candidate Hillary Clinton

made racial justice and criminal justice reform the subject of her first major policy speech

back in April in response to the Baltimore uprising that was sparked by the death in police

custody of Freddie Gray. One month later, former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley became the first

candidate to hear directly from protesters when he declared his candidacy back in May.

You are lying! Stop your lies! You are lying to these people, Mally! Stop it! You are lying!

You are lying!

Activists stepped up their effort to hashtag say her name. And within a week O'Malley,

...