Posted on 08/20/2020 10:22:57 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Throughout his run for the presidency, Joe Biden has been heralded as a champion for equality and racial justice, but his long career in politics directly contradicts this, as it has been marked and ultimately defined by six straight decades of segregationist policies, hostility towards minority communities, and outright racism.
After he was first elected to the Senate in 1972 at the age of 30, Biden abruptly changed course on an issue on which he had campaigned: School integration through busing. Biden joined with the segregationist bloc of the Democratic caucus and actively worked to oppose school busing.
“I think the concept of busing...that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride,” he told National Public Radio in 1975. “[Desegregation] is a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.”
That year, Biden sponsored a bill that would limit the power of courts to order school desegregation through busing.
He even said he would theoretically support a Constitutional amendment to stop busing and, amazingly admitted that he was siding with racists in the Democratic Party.
Biden’s legislation passed the Senate on a 50-43 vote, and Biden championed his anti-busing legislation throughout the 1970s. In 1977, he co-authored a bill that dramatically limited the ability of federal courts to order busing. To get it passed, he actively sought the support of leading southern segregationists.
A report from the Civil Rights Commission released later that year determined that Biden’s efforts had badly hindered school integration. Even his now-running mate, Kamala Harris, then a young girl, was impacted, and she let Biden know during the first Democratic Presidential Primary Debate last year.
"There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day," she told him. "And that little girl was me."
Biden insisted that his bills had nothing to do with racism, but in 1977 he said during a Senate hearing that what he feared the most if his legislation failed was his children growing up in what he called a “racial jungle” if busing led to rapid and massive school integration.
"Unless we do something about this,” he said, “my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have got to make some move on this."
Over the next few years, Biden turned his attention from school segregation to the mass incarceration of minority communities through an even tougher approach to the War on Drugs than the Reagan Administration advocated.
In 1984, Biden championed the Comprehensive Control Act, which Vox reported “expanded federal drug trafficking penalties and civil asset forfeiture, which allows police to seize and absorb someone’s property — whether cash, cars, guns, or something else — without proving the person is guilty of a crime.”
Two years later, he co-wrote the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which “ratcheted up penalties for drug crimes” and “also created a big sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine; even though the drugs are pharmacologically similar, the law made it so someone would need to possess 100 times the amount of powder cocaine to be eligible for the same mandatory minimum sentence for crack. Since crack is more commonly used by black Americans, this sentencing disparity helped fuel big racial disparities in incarceration.”
By 1989, new President George H.W. Bush pledged to escalate that war and gave a nationally televised speech outlining what he called a National Drug Control Strategy. It called for “more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors,” and tougher sentences for drug dealers and users alike.
Biden delivered the Democrats’ response to that speech…and said Bush wasn’t going far enough.
"Quite frankly, the president’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand," he said. "What we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam--not a limited war, fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy."
"[Bush's plan] doesn’t include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, not enough prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time," Biden added.
He even said that he didn't just want harsh punishments for drug dealers, he wanted tougher sentences for drug users to, as he put it, “hold every drug user accountable."
Liberals saw this as a direct assault on minority communities, who were disproportionately impacted by the crack cocaine epidemic that led to a massive spike in crime rates throughout the 1980s and 1990s. When Democrats and Republicans united in an effort to reverse this trend, Biden gave a famous speech in 1993 in which he used barely coded racist language to describe who he called "predators on our streets."
"[There is] a cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally... because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity," Biden said. "We should focus on them now [because] if we don't, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now. And, Madam President, we have predators on our streets."
Biden helped author the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which led to dramatically higher incarceration rates across the country and, its critics contended, locked up Black and Hispanic Americans at far higher rates than whites. It was, they said, a racist piece of legislation that has devastated minority communities for a quarter of a century.
By the early to mid-2000s, Biden began getting more overt in his racist comments, telling a man of Indian descent in 2006 that in his home state of Delaware, one can’t go into a 7/11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts without having a slight Indian accent.
The comment was an obvious reference to the stereotype of Indian-Americans as convenience store owners, and Biden was pilloried for it.
A year later, during his second run for the presidency, he became embroiled in controversy when he described one of his opponents, then-Senator Barack Obama—a Black man—as "articulate" and "clean."
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."
That same year, while campaigning in Iowa, Biden said that schools in Iowa perform better than schools in Washington D.C. because D.c. schools have far more Black students.
"There's less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with," he told The Washington Post.
When Biden sought re-election in 2012, he made a another controversial remark that was widely interpreted as racist; telling a primarily Black audience that his opponents, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, wanted to enslave them.
Biden was widely condemned, including by Black members of his own party like Congressman Artur Davis, who called it "racial viciousness."
In 2019, Biden announced a third run for President and reflected on his work in the 1970s with segregationist Senators, which drew outrage from fellow Democrats including Harris.
"To coddle the reputations of segregationists, who, if they had their way, I would literally not be standing here as a member of the United States is, I think, misinformed," she said in a news release. "And it’s wrong."
"You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys’," Senator Cory Booker said in a statement of his own. "Vice President Biden’s relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone."
Later last year, Biden came under fire for making reference to “gangbangers” when describing Black teenagers, saying that "we've got to recognize that kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gangbanger."
The same month, Biden told an audience that "poor kids are just as smart and just as talented as white kids."
This past May, Biden again courted controversy when he appeared on “The Breakfast Club” radio show and told host Charlamagne Tha God that if you are still deciding whether to vote for him or President Trump, "you ain’t black."
"Listen, you’ve got to come see us when you come to New York, VP Biden," Charlamagne told him after a Biden aide interrupted the interview to tell them that their time was up. "It’s a long way until November. We’ve got more questions."
"You’ve got more questions?" Biden incredulously replied. "Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black."
Two months later, during a virtual press conference with Black and Latino journalists, Biden said that unlike the Black community, the Hispanic community was actually diverse.
"What you all know but most people don't know, unlike the African American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things," Biden explained. "You go to Florida you find a very different attitude about immigration in certain places than you do when you're in Arizona. So it's a very different, a very diverse community."
During that same press conference, Biden asked if a Black journalist was on cocaine and a junkie. When CBS reporter Errol Morris asked Biden whether he had taken a cognitive test, Biden became angry.
"No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test?" he shot back. "Come on, man. That’s like saying to you before you got on this program if you had taken a test [on] were you taking cocaine or not? What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?"
This casual racism is, sadly a hallmark of Biden's discourse. For the entire duration of his career in politics, from 1972 to today, Biden has demonstrated a consistently racist attitude that has manifested itself in shockingly bigoted comments as well as deeply problematic public policies. While his campaign tries to pass him off as a crusader for racial justice, he has in fact stood in its way during six straight decades of abject racism.
Audio and video clips at link.
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It is HILARIOUS that Biden can wrap himself in righteous bloviation about civil rights: when the rubber hit the road, all the jerks who voted for the Kennedys and their buddies like him wanted to have nothing to do with black people. They were just trying to make themselves look good.
A little history:
Thank you! Not sure why this post isn’t getting more hits.
I shouldn’t have posted about CHICKENS soon thereafter, LOL!
I’m not sure why the Republicans aren’t beating the crap outta Biden with this stuff.
The guy has one of the most cynical, hypocritical and corrupt records in American politics and he gets away with it doing his Chauncey Gardner routine which is not new for him.
‘Being There’ is probably one of my favorite novels, ever. Read it in High School - I should read it again. ;)
Had my kid watch the movie a month ago so he could understand the current Presidential campaign.
As in, life imitates art.
Good for you! The movie was pretty good, too. I’m more of a ‘reader’ so it takes a LOT for me to get into movies made from favorite novels. ;)
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