A quote from his plan for Black America:
“He is running for President to rebuild our economy in a way that finally brings everyone along—and that starts by rooting out systemic racism from our laws, our policies, our institutions, and our hearts.”
Do you not see his “joke” as a kind of racism that is rooted in his heart? Maybe you don’t, I don’t know. Here’s what I do know, any little thing a Republican does cannot be written off as a badly worded joke. Cannot be dismissed as a gaffe (gaffe is a word that is exclusively used for Biden, which I find interesting). Those things that are seen as, “Oh, Uncle Joe, you behave now...” are signs of mental illness, racism, evil, blah blah blah when a Republican does it.
Wanna know something? I've met Bill Weld, former republican governor of Massachusetts, on *many* occasions, as I was smart/lucky enough to go to the same school as one of his daughters. And while he wouldn't have made this sort of joke (he's far too uptight to even try), if he did...I'd let it slide. I wouldn't care much if Dolt 45 said it - although he's far too racist to do so, he's more of a "Go back to your ******** country of Africa!" angry and ignorant type. Frankly, I'd consider it a major deescalation.
What's in Biden's heart is his problem, not mine. What I expect is that he, like the vast majority of politicians, will try to enact his proposals.
Republican candidates have had nice little blurbs in their platforms about what they are going to do for Black America, too. What does it actually mean when any candidate writes some nice ad copy for their campaign? Nothing. What matters is what they say and do, right?
It means a lot when they make particular promises. GWB was serious about recruiting nonwhite voters to the GOP, even if it didn't work, and he was badly undermined by others in his party.
It’s just that sometimes it feels like what truly matters is what side they are on. Every Democrat is an ally and every Republican is the enemy -and vice versa, make no mistake- and what they say and do (or are accused of) is interpreted thusly.
No, Biden has earned the benefit of the doubt here. Yes, he's always been gaffe-prone. He's also an old white man who served the US as the first black president's (a man who, on paper, was less qualified than him) right hand man for nearly a decade, without complaint. And as much as younger people ant to make it out like he was the architect of mass incarceration - first, check out Nixon and Reagan, and second, having seen the devastation of the Crack Era, um, a lot of black people at the time were clamoring for violent criminals to be put under the jail.
Likewise, Dolt 45, and much of the modern GOP, have worked hard to earn their reputation. Voter suppression, demands that black people obey cops immediately but white people can stand and shriek at them, point AR-15s at them, and the like, divestment from black communities, howling that anything Obama did was "Reparations" or "Kenyan Anti-colonialism" (as if either would be wrong), putting a pack of overt white supremacists in charge of the executive branch, and so forth. It's not that we don't trust them, it's that we trust them to be aggressively anti-black, based on their long history of anti-black behavior.
