Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Steve Urkel of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, is known for his gaffes, but his whole “Did I do that?” bit after sticking his foot in his mouth is getting old.
On Thursday, Biden told a group of mostly minority voters in Iowa that “poor kids” are just as bright as “white kids,” according to the Washington Post.
“We should challenge students in these schools that have advanced placement programs in these schools,” Biden said during a town hall in Des Moines. “We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”
After looking out and seeing Bill Duke pointing back at him, Biden then added:
“Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”
Biden’s “gaffe,” as just about every mainstream media outlet put it, replaces poor children with minority children and that isn’t a mistake. For Biden, black and Latino kids are poor and white kids are wealthy. We don’t have to do a psychoanalysis of Biden’s brain in order to see that he’s got some deep-rooted, embedded, racist-y feelings around color.
From the Post:
Thursday was not the first time Biden’s comments on race have prompted scrutiny.
In February 2007, on the day he launched his bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Biden found himself defending comments made a week earlier in an interview with the New York Observer about then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
In the interview, he called Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Biden issued a statement that day, saying: “I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Sen. Obama.”
Biden has dropped these microaggressive racists-ass comments before and for some reason, he gets a pass because he’s “Uncle Joe,” the racist-y uncle who says crazy, fucked up, awkward shit but he’s loveable because he knows the black handshake and can rap all the words to “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.”
What many have ignored is that Biden is basically the Democrats’ low-level version of Trump—without the moral bankruptcy, Russia influence, outright xenophobic and overt racist comments—but it’s amazing to me that despite his inability to crush a debate and his continuous fuckups, he’s still leading early national polling as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Shortly after the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, Biden spoke at a fundraiser in San Diego and the 76-year-old talked about the tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan. Da fuck? Was there more tragedy that weekend that we didn’t know about or did a presidential hopeful still pushing to win the nomination really just fuck up the names of both places where mass shootings took place?
You know who else fucked up the name of the place where a mass shooting just happened? Trump.
Think that the Trump comparison is a little far-reaching? Well, tell me who said this when asked about reparations:
“I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”
If you guessed Uncle Joe, then you’d be right. It was his response in 1975 to the idea of possibly paying black people for America’s greatest sin. Biden can keep riding former President Obama’s clout train to the nomination. But at some point, Biden has to stand on his own two feet as the person who he is and be judged as such—racist-y “gaffes” and all.