How many insults, excuses and fake apologies are Black Voters supposed to take from Joe Biden as he risks alienating Black voters after race remarks?
It’s not about his age. It’s about whether he has offended black voters.
At a convention for Black and Hispanic journalists, a Black reporter asked Joe Biden whether he has taken a cognitive test.
This was Biden’s response: “No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man! That’s like saying you, before you got in this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”
Had that answer come from President Trump it would have been blasted, virtually nonstop, as blatantly racist. But the Biden campaign was basically allowed to brush off the query as “preposterous” rather than address the appropriateness of the words spoken by Trump’s Democratic challenger. Besides the matter of relatively low-key media coverage of Biden’s over-wrought objections to a perfectly valid question posed to a 77-year-old presidential candidate, it raises another serious political issue: How many more insults will Black voters take from Biden in the interest of defeating Trump? And at this point, wouldn’t a failure to select a Black woman as his running mate be the ultimate insult? Biden’s credibility as Barack Obama’s friend and vice president can go only so far.
“He’s making us all nervous,” said Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a media and political strategist, about Biden’s recent gaffes. “I think some of his responses are just plain sloppy.” And Ferriabough Bolling knows sloppy and what it’s like to clean it up. She was Jesse Jackson’s New England press secretary when Jackson was running for president in 1984 and referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown” during a conversation with a Washington Post reporter. Today, she defends Biden the same way she defended Jackson — saying she knows “what’s in his heart,” no matter how awkwardly those feelings may be expressed. In contrast, she said, “Trump doesn’t make gaffes”; in other words, he’s as racist as he sounds.
But Ferriabough Bolling has her forgiveness limits, too. Last May, she chided Biden after his “You ain’t Black” quip to Charlamagne tha God, cohost of the radio show “The Breakfast Club.” As she wrote in a Boston Herald column, “You definitely don’t want black folks to feel taken for granted and so disillusioned that they sit out the election.” And she still worries about that, especially with young Black voters.
During that convention of Black and Hispanic journalists, Biden also made some waves when, in response to a question about engagement with Cuba, he said, “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things.” For that, he’s also forgiven, on the same essential grounds that he’s not Trump. Or as Jeffrey Sanchez, a former state representative and longtime Biden supporter, put it, “He’s not the shell of a human being that’s in the president’s office right now.” Sanchez — now a senior adviser at the public affairs firm Rasky Partners — said he applauds the discussion of diversity in the Black and Latino communities, and that Biden’s record of fighting for health care and economic justice is what matters.
An answer Joe Biden gave in the Houston Debate might come back to haunt him.
Biden had been performing effectively throughout the first half of the debate, then the subject turned to the matter of race and inequality, and moderator Linsey Davis posed this question to Biden:
“In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation and I”ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”
There was a smile (some called it a “smirk”) on Biden’s face as he listened to the question. And he answered her this way:
“Well, they have to deal with the “look”, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where, look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level. Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are “I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school. Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not like they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.”
The post-debate commentariat pounced on the “record player” comment, noting that it suggested a lack of familiarity with more modern-day devices, like the eight-track tape or Walkman. It was viewed mostly as a proxy for his age, a self-inflicted wound from a candidate stuck somewhere in the 1970s technologically. But by Friday morning, attention had begun to shift to the broader and far more culturally fraught implications of what Biden was saying: Did he mean that black parents depended on an army of white people with degrees to help them raise their kids?
Anand Giridharadas, an author and editor-at-large at TIME magazine, helped trigger a Twitterstorm about the nature of Biden’s comments. “Right now, somewhere, in some newsroom, some brilliant journalist ought to be pitching a big analytical story parsing Joe Biden’s statement and explaining why it was so troubling and ignored by so many people. It is a textbook example of the racism that is still respectable.”
There’s some anecdotal evidence that other journalists are already on the case. New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister wrote:
“Yes. Syntactically this reminded me of the viral Miss Teen USA answer from years ago. But the substance of what he was trying to say was much worse.” Journalist David Rothkopf wrote: “This is an important and accurate thread. I don’t believe Joe Biden is a bad person. I just think this once again reveals that he is not of this era or suited to lead for nearly the decade ahead.” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie joined the thread as well, while also noting the meandering nature of Biden’s words.
At the risk of stating the obvious: Biden’s lead in the polling rests in substantial measure on his enormous strength in the African-American community. It is why he is far ahead in South Carolina (where black people cast the majority of Democratic primary votes), while doing much less well in Iowa and New Hampshire. It is why sustaining that strength is crucial to his chances; over the past decades, no Democrat has won the prize without winning the lion’s share of the African-American vote. Eroding that support is crucial to the hope of Trump, which is why Kamala Harris went after him back in June on his self-proclaimed ability to work with Southern segregationists.
And it suggests that if the Twitterstorm gains salience over the next several days “if his comments are interpreted as cluelessly condescending at best” it poses a serious danger to his prospects.
For those troubled by Biden’s sometimes cringe-worthy statements, Sanchez said, “Look where he puts his heart. I have faith in him. I have faith in what he’s done and what he’s going to do.”
To Ferriabough Bolling, “Anything is better than Trump. And Biden is better than most because of his relationship with Obama.” Still, an insurance policy beyond he’s-better-than-Trump would help. “With all the gaffes lending themselves to various interpretations, a woman of color as vice president becomes a necessity, especially in this climate,” said Ferriabough Bolling.
Biden wouldn’t be where he is without Black voters. Representative James Clyburn helped set up the South Carolina primary win that resurrected Biden’s candidacy and turned him from loser into nominee. Once he said he would choose a woman as a running mate, several smart, accomplished, and politically savvy Black women made the short list. After much jockeying, the reveal is said to be imminent. If a Black woman isn’t the final choice, Biden will have a lot more explaining to do.
And answers like the ones he gave last week won’t be so easy to forgive and forget.
Biden has some resources to deploy here. His embrace of Barack Obama, and the former president’s obvious affection for him, may insulate him from the criticism. And he has an army of African-American allies, who see him as a fighter for racial justice going back decades. Whether they jump to his defense, or begin to create distance, will be a sign of whether this is a passing firestorm or something much, much worse.
Kamala Harris, also known as “Hillary Clinton in blackface” from the comparison between Harris and Clinton, “#BlackHillary” trended , “light-skinned Hillary”; Black Lives Matter movement and other critics have trolled her on Twitter with the hashtag #Kamalaisacop; advocates for criminal justice reform say her office was part of the problem, not the solution; Harris violated defendants’ constitutional rights by failing to disclose they knew about the tainted drug evidence in her crime lab scandal that resulted in the dismissal of over 1,000 drug cases; laughed when she said she smoked marijuana, yet opposed recreational pot while she convicted over 2000 people for having marijuana; oppossed independent investigations of police shootings; opposed racism in the legal system and the mandatory use of body cameras by police: California reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates Harris argued in court that releasing them would drastically reduce their prison labor pool (seriously!); there were 600,000 truant students in elementary schools, she passed a law making it a criminal misdemeanor for parents or guardians of truant children that could face a $2000 fine or up to one year in jail; She’s shut down websites of sex workers and prosecuted those involved, then moved to decriminalize sex work in a “massive shift; authored numerous policies that disproportionately harmed Black and Latino defendants; fake feminist! who is Jamaican/Indian who identifies and passed as a black woman.
Abdul-Jalil