Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a leading contender for the Republican vice presidential nomination, said Friday that white people tend to underestimate the persecution of African Americans at the hands of police.

"It's more dangerous to be black in America," Gingrich said during a Facebook Live conversation with liberal pundit Van Jones. "It's both more dangerous because of crime, which is the Chicago story. But it is more dangerous in that you're substantially more likely to end up in a situation where police don't respect you where you could easily get killed. I think sometimes for whites it's difficult to appreciate how real that is."

The comments came a day after five Dallas police officers were murdered by a racially-motivated gunman and the same week that two African-Americans were shot to death by police, sparking protests.

Get Breaking News Delivered to Your Inbox

Later, after discussing what Jones would do to reform police departments, Gingrich weighed in on his own personal history with racial issues.

"It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years, to get a sense of this. If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to have a corrective. But the minute you start getting the corrective - so Black Lives Matter in a sense, and I like your point, Black Lives Matter, too, would in fact try to be a corrective, which initially people reject because it's not in their world.

So to the degree you're an African American, you are raising your teenage boys to be very careful in obeying the police because literally, their lives are at risk and they can see it on television. At the same time, if you're a normal Caucasian, you don't see that, that's not part of your experience. And somehow, we have to be able to have a conversation and a dialogue where the mutual experiences start to say, 'gee if that's true under what circumstances can we fix it.' On both sides. "