Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) said Sunday on MSNBC that the 2020 presidential hopefuls who are white had “blemishes on their record about their relationships with black people.”

When asked about 2020 hopeful Pete Buttigieg, Waters said, “You know, one’s record will speak for itself. If there are facts about what he has done or what he has not done, then he’s going to have to try and make people, you know, believe that he understands where he made mistakes and promises to do better and be able to articulate how he’s going to do even better than he’s done in the past.”

She continued, “But let me just say this; most white candidates live in white communities. They go to white churches. Their children go basically to white schools, etc., etc. So, you know, they all have blemishes on their record about their relationships with black people. And so the way they change oftentimes is if we are able to organize and to protest and to force them to understand what they’re not doing in terms of equality and justice and force them to have to recognize that and do the right thing.”

“And so I think if you look at all of the records, you’ll find that the interaction with black people has not been stellar,” she continued. “They have not done anything that is so great that one can be said to be so much better than the other. They all need to understand their responsibility to all of the people. Many of these white candidates will go down to Selma, Alabama, for the first time to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They hadn’t done it before. Many of them will go to a black church for the first time in their lives.”

She added, “So we’re dealing with all of them. And now that the black vote has become very important and very influential. We need to use this opportunity to ensure that they’re making the kind of commitments that they can keep up with, that the promises they’re making will be kept, and we’ll know in the conversations that they have whether or not. They’re trying to learn something about black people overnight, or whether or not they really have given thought to it, they’ve been there, and they can identify what they’ve done in the past. And that goes for all of them.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN