Biden’s Blacks: Joe Biden has been deciding ‘who is black’ for decades, and in harmful ways
It was a Thursday. His wife had to be on at 6pm — and he was overtime. One could almost picture what was going on in his mind:
It was a glib wrap up to a strong performance. He had spent the last 6 minutes out of the 18 minute interview arguing that the 1994 crime bill he sponsored had not, as had been alleged, harmed the Black community in America, and that his “record” on Black issues was sterling. He had dodged discussion about the 1986 Bill by focusing on the public’s misperception of what was in the 1994 Bill; which was good, because what made him really look bad was in the ’80’s bills, not that talked-up ’94 bill. He had answered with a strong affirmative that he was vetting black women as potential 2020 running mates. Still, the host pressed him for more concrete promises he could make to the black community — seeing as how they all-but won him the primary.
And then Joe Biden said something no one was really expecting:
“Well, I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black!”
The interview ended with polite smiles. No feathers were visibly ruffled. In Joe Biden’s mind, he probably assumed he clinched it. He probably still assumed this when the post went live on Friday — but then the social media posts flooded in. They ranged from sharp offense to cool disapproval:
By the end of the next day, Saturday May 23 2020, Joe Biden had apologized to a growing ruckus over the last-minute gaff. “I shouldn’t have been so cavalier about responding,” Biden said during an apologetic phone call with the U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce, “I know that the comments have come off like I was taking the African American folks for granted … but nothing could be further from the truth.” Biden’s black surrogates went quickly to work assuring that the gaff was nothing more than a verbal misstep in poor humor, that it didn’t reflect Biden’s history or values. “The comments made at the end of the Breakfast Club interview were in jest,” Symone Sanders, a Biden advisor sought to clarify, “but let’s be clear about what the VP was saying: he was making the distinction that he would put his record with the African American community up against Trump’s any day.” The Trump campaign’s surrogates, being Biden’s 2020 bitter rivals, shrieked in condemnation at what was a clearly racist (or at least ‘race determinist’) comment. Predictably, with the 2020 Presidential Race being so tribally divisive between Republican and Democratic camps, the strongest reactions in defense or castigation of Joe Biden have mostly been partisan.
Still, over the past Memorial Day weekend, reactions among Black commentators and community members have been mixed:
Biden’s comments, whether a joke in poor taste or a sincere challenge, were hurtful towards Black America. There’s little in dispute over that. Admittedly; with as many black friends Biden purports to have, he was taking awkward liberties with things Black folk say amongst our own kin in private company (still, destructive). If so, whether wrong or right, Biden certainly was not saying something untoward about race and America; it was a social faux pas, a line crossed between ally and outsider.
At least: we can maintain that reading if we ignore that sticky 1986 crime bill Charlemagne tha God was originally pressing ole’ Joe on. In fact, it seems Biden’s campaign’s spin on his history with Black America wants voters to ignore many things Charlemagne tried to press Biden on last Thursday.
Part 1: Biden Is Too Good Deciding Who Is ‘Black’
When we examine the line of questions Charlemagne put forward to the former Vice President and Senator, the radio host was very much doing what Biden constantly challenges his critics to do: compare his record with Black America to Trump’s. The questions focused on three points:
1.) Joe’s record on criminal justice.
2.) Joe’s stance on marijuana legalization versus decriminalization.
3.) Joe’s success owed to Black voters, and his plans for recompense thereof.
To be clear, Biden gave answers to Charlemagne’s questions — but they were poor answers that failed to address the substance of the critiques being made (more on that in a moment). Joe corrected a popular misconception of the 1994 Crime Bill, in that it did not solely lead to America’s mass incarceration of blacks. Joe also laid out a good precautionary argument against full legalization of marijuana, in that the drug is still relatively little understood by medicine. Lastly, Joe recognized the debt he owes to Black voters is so-far unpaid, but assured voting for him would be better than voting for Trump. While this last one was what led to his gaff and provided the least substantial answer to assure further Black support, all three answers failed to address cogent criticism of the former Senator: his record on racial politics is far from ‘sterling’.
You see, despite the controversy over his race-baiting challenge, Joe has historically been too good at crafting policies that recognize who is black and who is white in the worst ways.
Joe Biden repeatedly drafted and supported racist drug control laws in the 1980’s that disproportionately targeted Black Americans over White Americans. In 1984 Biden and the notoriously racist Senator Armstrong Thurmond (R-SC) championed the Comprehensive Control Act that heralded federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses by expanding federal drug-crime sentences and civil asset forfeiture. Biden, in the interview, explained that the logic of the bill was to ensure white offenders served as long as black offenders — equalization, not discrimination — and that he “got stuck” authoring the bills as then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Note: in reality, then-Senator Biden begged a famed segregationist for his initial spot on the committee.) However, Biden’s denial of ownership of black mass incarceration seems to contradict his own writing of the Anti-Drug Abuse act of 1986. Biden’s ’86 Act established sentencing disparity between cocaine and crack use, despite the two being pharmacologically similar, and differing mostly in being consumed either by whites (cocaine) or blacks (crack). All told, Biden repeatedly created and pushed laws that ended up harming blacks through excessive force, over-policing, and over-sentencing compared to their white peers. No amount of double-speak can erase the lives he engineered to ruin, nor explain why this ruination was along blatantly racial lines. However, Joe’s drug policies continue to be racist to this day, despite him claiming he now regrets elements of legislation he advanced as a Senator.
Although often overlooked, the legalization-over-decriminalization debate over marijuana carries major racial implications with it. Put bluntly: decriminalization would carry a greater benefit for white Americans than black Americans. While decriminalization may — through sheer numbers — partially alleviate some over-policing of black communities, decriminalization historically benefits white Americans more, with black Americans being prosecuted more for marijuana offenses under ‘decriminalization’ than their white peers. Legalization, on the other hand, would stand to equally benefit both whites and blacks, as blacks could (resources willing) equally take advantage of the business opportunities that whites do under decriminalized operations. Biden’s current policies continue his lop-sided racial attitudes towards crime that harms blacks while benefiting whites.
Last to consider is the point Charlemagne put to Joe: Biden owes black America but has failed to address their needs. Biden emphasizes that his policies lean meaningfully more progressive to blacks than whites: he proposes allowing black and brown college students debt forgiveness if they attend a public university, for example, although he has little in his platform that speaks to black issues. While the national horrors of the Covid-19 epidemic have once again revealed black lack of access to healthcare, Joe Biden still opposes expanding Medicare to all Americans. Hundreds of years after slavery’s prohibition, blacks still suffer the economic and physical tolls of enslavement and continuing systemic racism. Some authors and activists, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, make the case that black folk in this country deserve reparations for slavery, and that nothing less ought to be demanded of our political leaders. Coates points to Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree who argues that this is best accomplished by instituting a broad public works and job training program that “takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” Biden’s policies lack this kind of substantive goal that Charlemagne seemed to be fishing for to justify continued black support of Joe Biden. Thanks to a crucial primary endorsement by long-serving Congressman Jim Clyburn that dramatically reversed Biden’s earlier primary losses, Black Americans may have delivered the presidential candidacy to a man whose crime legislation and health-care opposition reinforced the systemic racism that we now labor to undo.
Ironically, it seems that Coates’s, Ogletree’s and Charlemagne’s substantive policy promises to black America would have come from a different candidate — Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Part 2: Co-Opting of Black Agency, and Pushback
Senator Sanders promised many substantive policy proposals that would have, unlike former Vice President Biden’s platform, advanced the interests of black Americans in dramatic ways. Staggering racial disparity between white and black Americans means that Sanders’s radical policies of wealth taxation and robust social programs would have benefitted black Americans, in part simply by closing that unjust resource gap. Further, Sanders’ radical policies — like universal health care, debt forgiveness, or a green new deal jobs program — would be quantitatively better for The Culture than Biden’s half-hearted liberal policies. This is not news to many of us: regardless of the mainstream media narrative that black voters love Joe Biden for his connections to Obama’s presidency, younger voters were three times as ready to back Sanders for his policies. Rather, Biden seemed to sweep the south the same way the above policies were cast by his team as race-neutral for years: by the endorsement of elderly, conservative community power-brokers.
Biden relied on the support of older black voters and democratic establishment players to hustle the vote out of the south that saved his campaign’s hide. In the days before the endorsement, black voters were swayed by Representative Clyburn’s 11th-hour endorsement of Biden, who had been beaten back to single digits in the polling beforehand. Some drama-laced retellings link Clyburn’s endorsement to an elderly church usher — an unwittingly dark retelling, as black folk politicking against the interests were linked to churches by writer activist James Baldwin (who compared pastors to pimps in Harlem) and targeted sub-prime interest scandals that used black churches as advertising networks. Notably, black support for Biden in the lead-up to super Tuesday was significantly older, while younger black voters preferred Sanders’s radicalism. This is all to say that Biden does not enjoy universal support among black voters, and not even among black democrats — but, troublingly, he and his allies are acting as though he does.
Joe Biden has a problem with co-opting black agency; like his tough-on-crime legislation, or reproductive rights stances, this is both a historic problem and a contemporary concern. To be frank, Biden at times acts as if he owns blackness in uncomfortable ways.
Biden often flexes endorsements he simply doesn’t have. In defense of his racist anti-drug legislation pushed in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, Biden has often defended himself that ‘Black leaders and communities were asking for something to be done about the crime problem’. The truth is more mixed, or explicitly against Biden. Many communities were asking for solutions to endemic community crime — but these requests were almost always in the form of radical job and resource-enabling programs, not being over policed. Further, many times black leaders and communities explicitly challenged Biden’s bills, calling them out as racist and unjust. These awkward pretensions of black support continue into the current controversial gaff, with Joe Biden claiming endorsement from the NAACP that he straight doesn’t have. Although any reasonable person could see that it was only a matter of time before former President Barack Obama endorsed his one-time Vice President, it became a running meme that Biden often propped up his own popularity with older blacks by name dropping Obama. Biden has historically put his words in black people’s mouths like a racial political pantomime to justify his policies, even though they have either failed or directly harmed the black electorate.
All this isn’t to say Biden hasn’t been a useful ally at times for black Americans — contrary to how both right-wing and leftist media would like to portray him. Biden has fought to expand vital civil rights protections for Americans that guarded black agency — but Biden also cozied up to segregationists and sounded the retreat on integration. Joe Biden is an ally to black America — but an ally who has repeatedly caused lasting pain to us, while refusing to recognize that his policies cause and reinforce that pain. Biden is very good at distinguishing black Americans from white Americans — but often as a means of (unintentionally or not) harming black America. His comment revealed a toxic quality to his allyship, where his friendship is mixed with presumed ownership and destructive paternalism. Simply reminding black America that he has a sincere friendship with our first Black president isn’t enough to escape criticism. Biden has an established history of co-opting black agency to push forward policies that are quantitatively worse for black people, and his comment not only culturally overstepped, but was ruthlessly cynical in ignoring those harms.
Although the 2020 election is too distant to predicate outcomes with certainty, Biden’s lackluster policies and paternalistic attitude is becoming noticed by democrats of all colors. Leaked insider info shows Biden desperate to capture Sanders’s supporters, while numerous black twitter commentators pointed out Biden’s racial and policy hypocrisies:
Many younger voters — I included — are for pushing to withhold support of Joe Biden until he makes concrete policy commitments that incorporate our interests. So far, it is unclear how the Biden campaign will respond. At the time of this writing, Biden has touted elevating progressive darlings to policy-task forces, without any explicit commitments to radical policies. Worryingly, with black deaths mounting in the wake of Covid19, Biden still holds firm against expanding accessible health care in ways that would benefit his supporters — even though black Americans are stymied in healthcare access in this country. Meanwhile, while older establishment mouthpieces and centrist democrats attempt to shame or scare more radical black voices into throwing support behind Biden, Trump’s campaign is making what ruckus they can over this to sway more nihilistic voters to their camp. As Biden’s campaign and surrogates continue to downplay his legislative history of systemic racism and lack of substantive policy proposals, it will remain an open question which way we will vote come election day 2020.
