As the legacy media and others on the Left herald Joe Biden as the man who will bring about some new progressive era, they have conveniently forgotten the racist policies and actions that pockmark his political career. While the Left has spent the last four years hounding President Trump as a racist– with scant evidence — Joe Biden advocated for and wrote actual policies that may have negatively impacted minorities for decades. From his adamant stance against racial integration, his infamous crime bill, and, most recently, his insistence that “you ain’t Black” if you don’t vote for him, Biden’s racist legacy as a career politician stands in stark contrast to the reputation he enjoys on the supposedly ‘anti-racist’ Left.
His opposition to busing over fears of a “racial jungle”
Early in his career as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, Biden became one of the most vocal advocates for maintaining racial segregation in all of America. He was the “leading anti-busing crusader” for the Democrats and found himself very much “in league” with staunch segregationists. According to The New York Times:
He emerged as the Democratic Party’s leading anti-busing crusader — a position that put him in league with Southern segregationists, at odds with liberal Republicans and helped change the dynamic of the Senate, turning even some leaders in his own party against busing as a desegregation tool.
In an interview with CNN, Jason Sokol, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, emphasized that Biden was “strongly opposed to busing and was very interested in the passage of the anti-busing legislation” and that his approach “wasn’t a half-hearted thing.”
In his opposition to integration through busing, Biden famously warned that such a policy could create a “racial jungle” or sorts, as detailed by David Harsanyi of the National Review:
Biden might have later claimed to have ‘marched in the civil-rights movement’ (he didn’t) and to have represented Black Panthers (he almost surely didn’t), but in reality he was one of the leading voices in the Democratic Party opposing busing reforms. Now, we can debate the usefulness of busing, but there is no debate over whether Biden said that without ‘orderly integration’ his children would be growing up ‘in a racial jungle.’
In a bit of irony that now borders on the absurd, vice-president-elect Kamala Harris chastised Biden’s opposition toward busing during a heated debate in 2019 stating, “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,” according to CNBC.
In a television interview Biden gave in 1975 on the volatile subject, he argued that “such steps” as mandatory busing would be a source of greater animosity between Americans, The New York Times reported.
“This is the real problem with busing…You take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school, and you’re going to fill them with hatred.”
“And what about the black student from Wilmington’s east side? You send him to A.I. Dupont, bus him through Centerville every day, then send him back to the ghetto. How can he be encouraged to love his white brothers?”
His rubbing elbows with segregationists
Joe Biden’s opposition to busing was surely supported at the time by segregationists around the country- some of whom Biden considered allies.
He regarded George Wallace in a positive light and “bragged about receiving an award from… the former Alabama governor and one of America’s most notorious segregationists,” according to Rolling Stone.
In the same piece, Rolling Stone reported that Biden also once proclaimed during a campaign speech that “we (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”
As The Washington Examiner detailed, former segregationist Strom Thurmond was one of Biden’s “closest friends” by his very own admission.
“Thurmond…ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform and led a record-setting filibuster to block the Civil Rights Act in 1957. He later softened his stance on civil rights issues in the 1980s but never fully renounced his position on segregation or the racially inflammatory comments he made during his presidential campaign.”
Biden even spoke at Thurmond’s funeral, lauding him as great leader and man of conviction.
Not surprisingly, both Biden and Thurmond were very much opposed to “mandatory busing to desegregate schools in the 1970s and 1980s.”
In 1975 Biden “stunned his colleagues” by teaming up with Jesse Helms, “the segregationist senator from North Carolina,” to author an “anti-busing amendment to that year’s education spending bill,” according to The New York Times.
His 1994 Crime Bill
The inherently specious notion of “systemic racism” has been at the forefront of the Left’s narrative these last six months and counting. Spurred on by the extremism of organizations such as Black Lives Matters and the growing prevalence of ideas such as ‘Critical Race Theory,’ the term is fast becoming an unfortunate and divisive cultural mainstay in our nation.
If, for the sake of argument, we concede to the idea of “systemic racism,” then Joe Biden was very much an architect of it for close to three decades as the author of The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Critics of his bill argue that it disproportionately targeted Black Americans and lead to their mass incarceration, according to the National Review.
Critics, mostly contemporary Democrats, argue that the law helped create a mass-incarceration regime that disproportionately affects African Americans. We can debate the effectiveness of the policy, but Biden can’t claim he didn’t brag that the bill does ‘everything but hang people for jaywalking.’
The Atlantic argued that Biden’s crime bill “helped lead to the wave of mass incarceration that’s resulted in the United States accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.”
Lenny McAllister, a Black conservative, told NPR that Biden’s “1994 crime bill disproportionately impacted [primarily Black] communities such as Homewood-Brushton where literally generations of fathers and mothers spent a disproportionate amount of time in jail.”
Biden, for his part, had little patience or sympathy for the perpetrators of crime regardless of race back in 1993 – a position diametrically opposed to the Left’s current stance – stating, “It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society…I don’t want to ask, ‘What made them do this?’ They must be taken off the street.” Biden also gave dire warnings of “predators in the streets” insisting that we simply “[l]ock the S.O.B.’s up,” according to The New York Times.
Hillary Clinton echoed Biden’s hardened stance in 1996 with her now-infamous and racist labeling of inner-city kids as diabolical “super-predators”:
“They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
Now, of course, Biden has tried to walk back his tough stance on crime. While vying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, he “unveiled a plan” aimed at “lowering incarceration rates, ending the federal death penalty and eliminating racial disparities in how people are sentenced,” in large part, because of the backlash against his 1994 crime bill “that some say contributed to mass incarceration, especially of black men,” Reuters reported.
“Under Biden’s new plan, he would aim to reduce the U.S. prison population, in part by ending the jailing of people solely for drug use offenses. He would also create a $20 billion grant program to incentivize states to shift their focus from jailing people to preventing crime.”
Though a decades-long proponent of the death penalty, Biden would also “scrap the death penalty at the federal level” and call on states to follow suit “by sentencing people to life without parole, rather than executing them.”
“You ain’t Black”
Biden’s most recent racist gaffe occurred recently on the campaign trail. In an interview with The Breakfast Club, Biden exclaimed that anyone who voted for Trump “ain’t Black” in his closing comments to the host: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”
The insinuation, of course, is that any minority that votes for Trump is some form of an Uncle Tom – one of the most derisive and racist accusations leveled at minorities, often by the Left.
Larry Elder, a conservative and producer of the documentary, Uncle Tom, points out in a piece for the Toronto Sun that “Democrat Identity Politics 101 dictate that Republican blacks lose their blackness, Republican women lose their gender and Republican Latinos cease being Latinos.”
On a deeper, perhaps more insidious level, such aspersions cast by the likes of Biden point to how the Left forces minorities to either tow the progressive line or be ostracized and forced to relinquish their own identity. One is simply not allowed to have a dissenting voice as a minority on the Left without fear of reprisal.
This is often how minorities are, essentially, used by the Left to do their bidding ad nauseam as well. In an essay for Townhall, professor and scholar Walter E. Williams touches upon an oft-ignored aspect of the overarching chicanery employed by the Left toward minorities by citing a telling quote from the late controversial civil rights leader, Malcolm X:
The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems…
Such a quote, even with the vitriol behind it, highlights the inherent racism behind Biden’s assertion and highlights why a growing number of minorities are simply no longer willing to be duped by the Left.