Skip to content

Uncle Joe Unchained! A Delaware Native Explains Why the Veep Is Not a Racist

Uncle Joe Unchained! A Delaware Native Explains Why the Veep Is Not a Racist

August 21, 2012 SVadmin Comments 0 Comment

Reprinted from Alternet (August 21, 2012)

By Eugene Holley, Jr.

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. As Chana Garcia wrote on Root.com,

“In the early ’80s, he pushed for more minorities to enroll in service academies such as West Point. A decade later, he nominated Gregory Sleet to serve as Delaware’s first black U.S. attorney and then as the state’s first black federal judge. He also helped local politicians like former City Councilman-at-Large Theo Gregory get elected.”

More broadly to the point: blacks care less what white politicians say; they care about what they support – as evidenced by the overwhelmingly positive support Biden enjoys from African Americans who benefitted from his passage of the Voting rights Act, Affirmative Action and Great Society programs.

Ask most brothers and sisters in my home state about Biden’s alleged gaffes and they’ll just shrug their shoulders and say, “that’s Joe.”  What they do marvel at is the extraordinary way Biden kept his mouth shut all these years. That Colgate-perfect smile he flashed at that infamous “debate” with Sarah Palin held back the fury we know Biden is capable of unleashing whenever he encounters absurdity, which is an occupational hazard these days.

Black and tan Delaware residents also know that Biden’s smile belies a lifetime’s worth of pain. He lost his first wife and year-old child in an automobile accident in 1972, suffered a brain aneurysm in his first presidential campaign in 1988, and overcame a stuttering problem to become one of the most accomplished foreign policy experts in our nation’s history. Blacks will forgive Biden’s missteps, simply because he’s been solid on traditional liberal issues — affirmative action, the equalization of educational opportunities and a woman’s right to choose.  (His uncharacteristically chauvinist treatment of Anita Hill at the infamous Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearing marking one big blemish against him.)

Because of Delaware’s small size, we always ran into Biden; at the supermarket, the University of Delaware Blue Hens Game, and more often than not, the Amtrak station, where as senator, he took the one-and-a-half train ride to DC, and came home to raise his kids. My late mother worked for the government, and often rode and chatted with Biden on the way to DC.

Of course, the haters have a list of supposed Biden blunders: his characterization of then-candidate Obama as the “first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” his blunt assessment of Delaware as “a slave state … [with] the eighth largest black population in the country,” and his accurate, though clumsy 2006 comment on the unprecedented influx of Asian storeowners in biracial Delaware,” when he stated that, “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

Now that the Obama administration is vying for its second term, I think the world is going to see and hear the Joe Biden we Delawareans are used to. Compared to the coded language that counts for “straight talk” these days, I’ll take Uncle Joe’s jagged-edged truths any day.


Eugene Holley, Jr. is a Delaware-based writer/essayist. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Amazon.com, Ebony.com and Vibe. His work was featured in the anthologies, Best Music Writing: 2010, and Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Articles, Politics

Post navigation

PREVIOUS
5 Ways Privatization Is Ruining America
NEXT
Capuchin Monkeys Explain Occupy Wall Street (Hilarious)

Join Our Mailing List

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

CLICK IMAGE BELOW FOR MORE INFORMATION

DONATE TO THE FOOD BANK OF NEVADA COUNTY

(CLICK IMAGE)

DONATE TO NEVADA COUNTY RELIEF FUND (click image below)

Subscribe to Sierra Voices Journal

Jack Kornfield: A Steady Heart in Time of Corona Virus (Part I)

Erika Lewis, Shaye Cohn, Craig Flory – Got A Mind To Ramble

“Everlasting Arms”

Tara Brach: A Steady Heart in Time of Corona Virus (Part II)

Recent Posts

  • Bill Clinton Makes a Pathetic Attempt to Retroactively Justify His Decision to Expand NATO
  • The Ukraine War Seen “from 30,000 feet”
  • Former NATO Analyst & Top UN Official Says THIS Is The REAL Reason For War In Ukraine
  • DeSantis’ Attack on Disney Shows how Fascism Progresses Toward the Later Stages of Tyranny
  • The Man Who Predicted Russia Ukraine War

Recent Comments

  • Putin in Media Myth and Reality: Which is Which? on Ukraine War: A Bonanza for the Arms Industry
  • SVadmin on Countdown to World War III?
  • Pratima Basu on Scenes From Our Weekend at Lake Tahoe
  • IN PRAISE OF WARRIORS, NOT WAR on Celebrated to Death: Memorial Day Is Killing Us
  • SVadmin on How Suzanne Simard changed our relationship to trees

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • December 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009

Categories

  • Afghanistan
  • Aging
  • American Empire
  • Anti-Depressant
  • Arms Sales
  • Articles
  • Atlas Obscura
  • Authoritarianism
  • Black Lives
  • Black Lives Matter
  • Blog
  • Buddhism
  • Budget
  • Buskers
  • Capitalism
  • Carbon Offsets
  • Cartoon
  • China
  • Climate Change
  • Compassion
  • Constitution
  • Corona Virus
  • Corruption
  • Cosmology
  • Coup
  • COVID-19
  • Democracy
  • Depression
  • Disenfranchisement
  • Drought
  • Economics
  • Education
  • Election Fraud
  • Empire
  • Environment
  • Extinction
  • Farming
  • Fascism
  • Filibuster
  • Fire!
  • Food Insecurity
  • Foreign Policy
  • Forest Ecology
  • Forest Management
  • Fracking
  • Gardening
  • Gender
  • GOP
  • Great Movies
  • Groundwater
  • Halloween
  • Health Care
  • High Country News
  • History
  • Humor
  • Hunger
  • Idaho-Maryland Mine
  • Ignorance
  • Immigration
  • Indigenous Peoples' Day
  • Insects
  • Israel
  • Labor
  • Lobbying
  • Local
  • Lunar Influence
  • Marijuana
  • Masks
  • Medical Care
  • Men
  • Men's Issues
  • Mental Health
  • Middle Class
  • Military Industrial Complex
  • Mining
  • MMT
  • Modern Monetary Theory
  • Moral Obligations
  • Music
  • Native Americans
  • NATO
  • Neoliberalism
  • New Cold War
  • Nuclear War
  • Nutrition
  • Oligarchy
  • Palestine
  • Pandemic
  • Parenting
  • Peace
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Physics
  • Poetry
  • Police
  • Politics
  • Populism
  • Press
  • Race
  • Religion
  • Republican Derangement
  • Reviews
  • Revolution
  • Right-wing terrorism
  • Rights of Nature
  • Rise Gold
  • Rivers
  • Romance
  • Russia
  • Russiagate
  • Science
  • Slavery
  • Sleep
  • Smoke Inhalation
  • Student Debt
  • Summer
  • Technology
  • The Hartmann Report
  • Trump Virus
  • Tuba Skinny
  • Tyranny
  • Ukraine
  • Uncategorized
  • Unipolar vs. Multipolar
  • Vaccine Refusal
  • Vaccine Safety
  • Voting
  • War
  • War on Government
  • Water
  • Watersheds
  • Wells
  • Wildfires
  • Winter
  • Women's Issues
  • Work
  • Yemen

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
© 2022   All Rights Reserved.