Oh, please. Every damn white person I know has close relationships with a racist. Be it a friend, family member, coworker, someone you’re tolerating in your life is a stone cold bigot. Just about every person of color I know has someone with whom they’ve had to work with who is also a stone cold bigot, but you learn to put aside Karen “All Lives Matter” and her bullshit and work together so that you can have peace at your job and so that you can get keep your job and keep a roof over your head. This isn’t new. We are all tolerating some assholes in our life, and beyond that particular subject, we may actually even like them. Human relationships are complicated. Always have been. The fact that he got along with racists isn’t some new fangled thing. For examples of this phenomenon see the entire South for the last few hundred years.
Thats like self-deportation
That would explain the ticket, but not that they were and are best buddies.
It’s similar to when Native Americans volunteered to move to reservations.
Yeah, the best thing he could have done was say “I was wrong.”
Because we are desperate to be rid of this monster. Because many of us know what lies ahead in a second term and it’s do or die. Because we are confident Biden can win. People are angry at her because they feel like 2016 is happening all over again and the well of fear of that runs miles deep. Also, many feel the charge is completely unfair, that we know Joe Biden and the characterization is unfair. That’s the long and the short of it.
He’s making it clear that he always fully supported a person’s right to ride on a bus.
The real issue is not friendship with racists. It’s the selling out of school integration in the seventies, from which we have never recovered. Biden’s friendship with the racists was merely the result of that sellout. Other Dems accepted it at the time. It was a big setback no Democrat wants to acknowledge.
Seems a bit strong. Regardless, I don’t participate in any of my colleagues’ racism.
Look, it’s either Trump or an asteroid. You choose. At least an asteroid would be quick.
Is it really a surprise to anyone that white people in the 70s thought that things that made sense and seemed reasonable at the time were not nearly as beneficial to black folk as they could’ve been? That concessions were made in order to move the ball forward? Is that really a surprise?
It’s kind of hilarious to me that so many people apparently thought white people in the 1970s were super woke.
I don’t know much about what Biden did and didn’t do back then but I know the history of desegregation in Delaware is a bitter, contentious one. So if he was at all equivocal back then it went with the territory. He’s not a racist. But he is, and was, a politician.
That exactly.
Good question. I assumed he meant parents who were willing to have their kids take a long bus ride to get a better education, but you’re right that doesn’t really make sense in context. I suspect now that he meant local communities who voluntarily chose to implement busing programs to address desegregation, while he opposed federally mandated busing.
MSNBC had a fairly terrible quote from Biden when he was a young senator in the 1970s, published in a Delaware newspaper. He suggested that the only way to prevent busing was to have a constitutional amendment.” That suggests a whole ‘nother level of opposition to bussing.
that was my point. The fact that Obama had Biden for VP doesn’t tell us much – Biden was picked because he “balanced” the ticket for Obama, and Biden accepted because he wanted to be President someday.
Actually at this stage we want our candidates to keep going with their gut…
It will show us whether they will make a good nominee or, in this case, not good.
As Obama famously said: “Proceed”
I don’t think the concessions were made to move the ball forward as much as to prevent it from being moved even further back. My memory of the time doesn’t include lots of Black folks protesting the concessions. They felt retreat was necessary and maybe it was. I certainly don’t think white people in the 70’s were super woke. They had just elected Nixon to two terms and many were equivocating if not rioting about busing.
Biden is now taking heat for a retreat nobody wants to admit happened. But he will continue to take heat unless he starts being a bit more honest about it.
Voluntary busing is when the states do it.
Involuntary busing is when the Feds do it.
Maybe I’m not being fair, but that’s the first thing that popped in to my head.
Yeah, I looked up the system I knew in the Boston area as a kid. It was called METCO and it was voluntary. Boston (and Springfield to a lesser extent) put kids on buses to be received by suburbs that would have a certain number of slots open to them. My elementary school got two “METCO kids” per grade.
It’s a great feel-good “solution” but I don’t know that it actually solved much.
I have to admit I’ve lost touch with how school systems are dealing with segregation issues these days.
It has cracked me up watching this whole “more Catholic than the Pope” business from white folks who just a couple of Sundays ago were posting pics of the “the greatest man I’ve ever known” who happens to be a card carrying “n word” hollering racist. Relationships are complicated as hell. We have loved, cared for, worked with, liked, or had to deal with someone who is just an awful bigot, yet we put that it in a box so that we can move forward.
And where is the line drawn? I mean, anyone working with a Republican in the Senate right now is most likely working with a regressive, homophobic, misogynistic, piece of shit. In 30 years, is AOC gonna face this same shit for having worked with Ted Cruz? What about others? Because there are but a few Republicans who aren’t just as aggressively anti-woman and anti-LGBT as any of those segregationists were anti-black.