Prior to announcing her candidacy for the Democrat nomination for president, spiritual author Marianne Williamson asked white people at an event to apologize to the black people in attendance for the “evils” perpetrated against black people throughout United States history.

Williamson, whose “prayer” came during her “Love America Tour” at the Unity of Houston Church in 2018, asked the white people to hold hands with nearby black attendees.

As the audience repeated her every word, sentence by sentence, Williamson said:

As I speak, I am going to ask the white Americans in the room to please repeat after me. On behalf of myself and on behalf of my country, to you and all African Americans, from the beginning of our nation’s history, in honor of your ancestors and on behalf of your children please hear this from my heart. I apologize. Please forgive us. With this prayer I acknowledge the depth of the evils that have been perpetrated against black people in America. From slavery to lynchings to white supremacist laws to the denial of voting rights to all the ways, both large and small, all of the evil, all of them wrong, for all the opression, and all of the injustices, I apologize. Please forgive us.”

“With nearly 200 black people in the audience on their feet, Williamson apologized for slavery, lynching, murders, rapes of black women, destruction of the black family, mass incarceration of black men, being called the N-word and systemic and institutionalized racism and more,” according to the Houston Chronicle‘s Joy Sewing.

Williamson also made similar comments during her Love America Tour in 2016, according to a video uploaded to her YouTube account.

In 2016, Williamson also penned a poem titled “Prayer of Apology to African Americans.” A sample of that poem reads:

On behalf of myself, and on behalf of my country, to you and all African Americans, from the beginning of our nation’s history, in honor of your ancestors and for the sake of your children, please hear this from my heart…

I apologize,

please forgive us. With this prayer I acknowledge the depth of evils that have been perpetrated against black people in America.

From slavery, to lynchings, to white supremacist laws, to the denial of voting rights, to all the ways both large and small, that abuses have occurred — all of them evil, all of them wrong.

For all the oppression and all the injustice…

I apologize,

please forgive us. For the denial of human and civil rights, for inequities in criminal justice, for instances of police brutality, for the denial of opportunity, for economic injustice, for all ways that racism has fostered these wrongs…

I apologize,

please forgive us.