When it comes to race and gender policies, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump fall short, a panel of scholars and public figures argued on Tuesday.

While Clinton performed well at the first presidential debate on Monday, neither she nor Trump sufficiently addressed race or gender, asserted the panel, which featured Brandeis University African and Afro-American Studies professor Chad Williams, Harvard University public policy professor Leah Wright Rigueur and Massachusetts State Representative Tackey Chan.

“Let’s think about whether or not there were real winners or losers in terms not only of the things that were discussed, but the things that were not discussed,” moderator Anita Hill, a Brandeis professor of law and social policy, asked the panelists.

“In terms of who won the debate last night, I think we all lost,” Williams answered. Clinton’s failure to address her white privilege — the benefits she sees as a result of being white — was a disappointment, he said. Trump, on the other hand, represents the ideal of white, violent masculinity, he added.

Trump’s candidacy may be viewed as a reaction to heightened minority activism and shifting racial culture in America, Williams asserted. “You don’t have Donald Trump without Barack Obama. … I also think you don’t have the ascendancy of Trump without Black Lives Matter,” he said. “When we talk about making America great again, we’re talking about making sure that certain people stay in their place.”

“We’re talking about a moment that is a crisis of democracy,” Rigueur added. “But I’d also like to argue that we’ve been in moments where we’ve had crises of democracy and, in fact, it’s the nation’s most vulnerable citizens … [who] often rise to the challenge of pushing back against these kind of conceptions and ideas about democracy, particularly second-class citizenship.”

Both parties have overwhelmingly ignored black female voters — one of the most vulnerable groups — even though they serve as the “backbone” of the Democratic Party, said Rigueur. Although they had one of the highest voter turnouts of racial groups during the 2012 election, black women have not received enough outreach, she argued.

“You have to think big and small” when it comes to voter outreach, Chan agreed. “I’ll show up to your home and sit at your coffee table until I figure out what’s wrong.”

A large part of representing people is listening to their problems, figuring out how those problems fit into a larger framework and making policies to find solutions, he added.

As for Monday night’s debate, “the real question is: was it an issue they brought up that mattered to you, the individual voter? And I think the answer’s got to be ‘no,’” Chan argued. “The moderator … gave them enough wiggle room as candidates to speak to the people about what they think is important to you, and I’m not sure they get it.”

Neither candidate has placed enough focus on outreach and policy making for minorities, Rigueur agreed.

“Policy is missing from the conversation that we’ve been having. It is absolutely absent, and you should be shocked, we should be demanding a conversation about policy,” she said, calling for platforms that address minority poverty.

Hill asked the panelists how America’s apparent inability to discuss whiteness has affected policy making.

“You can’t really teach the dialogue if you don’t acknowledge that there is a problem to address,” Chan said, arguing that America has not yet realized the full extent of its race crisis. “You can’t see the problem in your house from inside your house. You have to go outside first. And I’m sorry to say that we’re not a very self-reflective culture.”

Williams, pulling out a copy of W. E. B. Du Bois’ writings, quoted: “‘This assumption that of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts.’”

“I don’t think we’re at a moment yet where we’re going to have a productive conversation … about kind of deconstructing whiteness” and examining race privilege, he concluded. “I think it’s going to take younger voters and other folks who understand this to really come challenge all of our elected officials to hold themselves accountable.”

—Editor’s note: this article was originally written for Prof. Eileen McNamara’s (JOUR) class “The Contemporary World in Print.”