A Delaware Native Explains Why VP Biden Is Not a Racist

This arrived in my inbox this morning, thought it quite telling,  and I wanted to share.

AlterNet / Eugene Holley, Jr. 

Uncle Joe Unchained!

A recent comment by Biden was racial, but it wasn’t racist. And truth be told, it needed to be said.

I know what you’re thinking: There goes gaffe-prone Vice-President Joe Biden again, putting his foot in mouth, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, causing headaches for the Obama administration. His latest offense : speaking in Virginia, the VP spoke to a cadre of Democratic African-American supporters, telling them how a Romney presidency would "unchain" Wall Street and “put y’all back in chains,” setting their hard-earned economic and civil rights back toward the dark decades of segregation. It didn’t take long for the usual traducers to accuse Biden of interjecting race into the campaign.

But here’s the problem – what Biden said was indeed racial, but it wasn’t racist. And truth be told, it needed to be said. A great many black Democrats in this country would agree with what he said, this writer included.

Why was it necessary for Biden to go for the metaphor of bondage? Because, as the great hip-hop trio De La Soul said, “The stakes is high.” I have personally heard some African Americans disenchanted that Obama is not the super-bad, black radical president they thought he would be say that they will sit this election out because Obama is just a politician, and the Democrats are just like the Republicans, so it doesn’t matter who wins. That defeatist mentality is dangerous when you consider how, if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s fiscal policies take effect, Medicaid, Medicare and other "entitlement" programs will be cut and will push the poor, minorities and women who depend on those programs further into the Tea Party-soaked quicksand of debt bondage.

In an age where political correctness is the overdosed order of the day, Vice-President Biden delivered the right kind of castor oil to cleanse the toxicity that obscures truth-telling in the hypersensitive era of the supposed, post-racial Obama presidency. In this kind of atmosphere, politicians are always, in the immortal words of James Brown, “talking loud and saying nothing.” With Biden, it’s more like deeds, not words.

As a native Delawarean and African-American, I always chaffed at the caricature of Biden as forgetful loose cannon, ‘cause I (and we First Staters) get Uncle Joe! He is the living embodiment of the small-wondered complexities and contradictions of the nation’s second smallest state; simultaneously Northern and Southern, urban and rural, equally distanced from New York and Washington, DC; the first state to ratify the Constitution and the last to end slavery. To be a politician in this state (with only three counties), Biden learned how to navigate between the urban New Castle County, where Wilmington, the state’s largest city is based; Kent County, home to the state capitol and the Dover Downs Speedway; and Sussex County, “downstate,” or “slower-lower," to us city-fied Wilmingtonians. The Vice Prez has spoken candidly and bluntly to whites and particularly, to blacks.

I know a host of old-timers who remember Biden when he was a teenaged lifeguard at Prices Run Swimming Pool in Wilmington’s East Side, which was (and still is) black. He was there when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968. “I was a fascination to everybody at Prices Run,” Biden wrote in his memoir, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics . “Most of the people I got to know there had literally never really talked to a white person.”

Black Delawareans have known this fact about Biden ever since he began his political career in the late '60s, and against local custom, campaigned in black neighborhoods.

Read the rest at the link above.

And so it goes.
*