U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gives powerful speech at U.N.: "I know the ugly face of racism"

United Nations — The Biden administration's U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave a stirring and deeply personal address to world leaders at U.N. Headquarters on Friday during a session on the "elimination of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance," recounting troubling chapters from her own life story.

"I am a descendant of slaves. My great grandmother Mary Thomas, born in 1865, was the child of a slave. That is just three generations back from me," she said.   "I grew up in the segregated South. I was bussed to a segregated school and on weekends, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on lawns in our neighborhood. When I was in high school, I was asked by a little girl, for whom I babysat, if I was an N-word because her dad had used the word for me."