Joe Biden is seen by many as one of the lead contenders among the Democratic Party’s candidates in the 2020 presidential election. With his standard Uncle Joe humility, he has proclaimed himself to be the “most qualified person in the country to be President.” However, there are more than a few skeletons in the former vice president’s closet that we need to talk about. In this article, we’ll be examing a young senator from Deleware and his opposal to efforts designed to end segregation.
When running for the U.S. Senate for the first time in 1972, a young Joe Biden had proclaimed himself a champion of integration and, more specifically, of bussing. Busing at the time was one of the most controversial techniques of ensuring that schools were integrated after the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education. However, once in office his view became radically different. From the time he entered office all the way up until 1980, he sided with radically racist senators like Jesse Helms (whom Biden called a close friend) in opposing any and all busing regarding anti-segregation efforts. His policies were so radically opposed to ending segregation that the NAACP ended up having to file a lawsuit over one of Biden’s amendments.
In an interview with U.S. News and World Reports in 1975, Biden spoke of his opposition to busing to integrate schools by claiming it “implied blacks have no reason to be proud of their inheritance and their own culture.” In other words, separate but equal is good in Mr. Biden’s opinion.
While Uncle Joe may try to claim that he was opposed to only one technique of desegregation, the actual historical facts tell a completely different story. In 1975, he championed an anti-busing provision that also barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from using federal money to “assign students or teachers by race,” which went far beyond busing alone and empowered segregation activists in many other actions.
Since his brand of liberal racism has fallen out of style, Biden has attempted some rather shoddy historical revisionism, as if he had bravely ushered in the civil rights movement by working at an all-black swimming pool, then later voting “bravely” for desegregation laws while actually viciously and consistently opposing many of them.
Let us not forget that in 2007, before becoming President Obama’s vice president, he once referred to the Illinois senator as the first “mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” The year prior to this, he had claimed, “You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. It’s a point. I’m not joking!” This was also around the same time that he told a Rotary Club in Delaware that their state had only fought for the Union during the Civil War because “we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”
Democrats today like to claim that even though their party had been the pro-slavery party in the 19th century, they are a completely different party today. I think Biden proves that this ugly past isn’t as distant as some would wish; whether or not he is selected as the 2020 candidate could be a telling answer on this hotly contested issue.
