How many passes are we willing to give President Joe Biden before we all just admit the obvious? Joe Biden is a bigot who has a backwards, Jim Crow-like worldview of Black Americans. He is not going to change.
At a recent briefing on the devastating Hurricane Ida, President Biden referred to one of the highest ranking Black American men in his White House senior staff as a boy.
Biden said, “And I’m here with my senior advisor and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well, man — and New Orleans and — Cedric Richmond.”
The Honorable Cedric Richmond serves as Senior Advisor and Director of the Office of Public Engagement to President Joe Biden. He is a former Congressman and head of the Congressional Black Caucus. Richmond is also a 47-year-old man.
Before Biden apologists go say Biden did not know it was a dehumanizing, emasculating and bigoted saying when directed to a Black man, let’s remember this is not the first time that this issue has come up with Joe Biden.
Remember during the Democrat primary Sen. Cory Booker and other Democrats rightfully took issue with Biden praising and working with a known segregationist when Biden said “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, he never called me boy, he always called me son.”
Senator Booker said in a statement “you don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys.’ Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity.”
Biden later told Al Sharpton, “I do understand the consequence of the word ‘boy.’” In other words, he knew how bad it was to refer to a Black man in such a way and yet he said it a few years later to Richmond.
In case you are wondering, there was no apology from Biden to Booker. In fact, Biden was quoted as saying “apologize for what?” before demanding that Booker apologize to him.
The irony is that, at the time, Rep. Cedric Richmond actually defended Biden for the boy comment and tried to downplay it, saying, “This is really a media issue and it’s an issue that’s going around on social media. But people are not talking about this.”
Joe Biden said racist things like this as a U.S. Senator, as Vice President, as a Presidential candidate and now as President…and gets a pass.
This is the same Biden who said “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as White kids.”
This is the same Biden who was against school integration because he did not want his children to grow up in “a racial jungle.”
This is the same Biden who said if you were unsure of whether to vote for him or Donald Trump, then “you ain’t black!”
This is the same Biden who said, “unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”
This is the same Biden who referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
This is the same Biden who talked about learning about roaches when working around Black kids at a Delaware swimming pool.
This is the same Biden who told a Black audience “Unchain Wall Street! They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.”
This is the same Biden who proudly served as the architect of the 1994 Crime Bill that led to the mass incarceration of thousands of Black Americans and the destruction of the Black family and black wealth.
This is the same Biden who talked about Black boys when he said on the Senate floor “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity…we should focus on them now” because “if we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now.”
Where is the outcry on BET, TV One, Black News Channel, MSNBC, or CNN?
Why were the liberal White House reporters silent the next day in the Press Briefing room? April Ryan and others did not ask one question to Jen Psaki about the offensive remarks. They covered for him — they always do and they always will.
There is no doubt that if President Trump had called me, Ja’Ron Smith, Scott Turner, Sec. Ben Carson, Ashley Bell, or Tony Lowden a boy like Biden did to Cedric Richmond, it would have made headlines in every Black media outlet and major news network. You would have multiple people calling him a racist, but with Biden there were just a handful of news stories on it.
During the sanitation strike in 1968, the now iconic images of Black men holding the signs that read “I AM A MAN” were not because they needed to remind themselves of that fact. It was because the Jim Crow era made it commonplace for Black men to never be given their due respect, never put on the same level as White men, never treated as equals. So, in private and in public Black men were called and treated like boys. It was intentional, it was hurtful, and Joe Biden knows that — but he still says it.
With Joe Biden we are well past the opportunity for another teachable moment. He missed the lesson several bigoted statements ago.
Paris Dennard is the National Spokesperson and Director of Black Media Affairs for the Republican National Committee (RNC). Follow him on Twitter: @PARISDENNARD.