Racism and white supremacy is a bipartisan effort. With that stated “F*@k” Trump, Democrats and Republicans. Condeming racism requires an objective and non biased perspective.
Unfortunately many people are inconsistent with condeming racism if they can’t politicize it. Many will make excuses and rationalize racism if it involves somebody they like or support. This is often why “Liberal Racism” is ignored. This inconsistency is one of the main reasons racism will never go away.
If I am objective and criticize Joe Bidens racist history, it’s deflected and met with “Just say your voting for Trump”. I understand that many people believe that Trump is racist and have this urgency and desire to “get Trump out by any means”. If “ending racism” is the goal then ignoring Joe Bidens racist history is a very counter productive and hypocritical.
I will not be bullied or shamed for calling out racism. White supremacy is also shaming others for calling out white supremacy. I’m a registered Independent that is consistent with calling out white supremacy and racism regardless who it is, nobody is above criticism.
The point of this article is not to persuade anybody to not vote for Joe Biden, however I feel that it’s important to be aware of his racist history if that is your candidate. Leadership should always be questioned.
Joe Biden has been in Congress for 40+ years and over time has created, implemented, supported and upheld racist and white supremacist laws, polices and regulations that have negatively impacted the black community, including supporting segregation and mass incarceration.
In 1975 Biden wrote and sponsored a bill ,with open segregationists and white supremacist, that would limit the power of courts to order school desegregation with busing and barred the federal government from withholding funding from schools that remained effectively segregated.
Co-sponsors included segregationist Sens.Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond. Political experts and education policy researchers say Biden did not simply compromise with segregationists he also led the charge on an issue that kept black students away from the classrooms of white students.
“His legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the “separate but equal” doctrine and undermined the nation’s short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say.”
Jack Greenberg, one of the lawyers who had won the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended segregation, and longtime director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the bill “heaves a brick through the window of school integration,”Biden was the man with his hand on the brick”.
Biden would have a showdown on Capitol hill against Ed Brooke, The first Black American popularly elected to Senate. Brooke was a large advocate and fought for integration and equality. For Brooke, integration was absolutely imperative. “Segregated schools denied black children equal opportunity. We had all-black schools and all-white schools, he recalled later busing was the best thing that we had to at least desegregate the schools at that time in our history.”
Biden sided with conservatives and sponsored a major anti-busing amendment. The fierce debate that followed not only fractured the Senate’s bloc of liberals, it also signified a more wide-ranging political phenomenon.
Biden was particularly effective in fighting integration because he did not use the overtly racist language of the segregationists, who warned of race mixing and black inferiority, Instead, Biden, talked about “forced busing” local control” and “parents rights.”
Brooke’s called the vote on Biden’s amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” He argued that Biden’s amendment would eliminate virtually every remedy for segregation, as school systems would be prohibited from assigning students on the basis of race no matter what the method. Brooke accused Biden of effectively leading an assault on integration.
As Boston NAACP leader Tom Atkins put it in March 1975, “An anti-busing amendment is an anti-desegregation amendment, and an anti-desegregation amendment is an anti-black amendment.”
Over the years Biden has tried to downplay his work with segregationist. Claiming he opposed the department of education forcing busing, yet supported integration. However his amendment to an appropriations bill that barred the federal government from withholding funding from schools that remained effectively segregated contradicts that sentiment.
A 1977 report on school desegregation by the Civil Rights Commission, a federal agency, described Biden’s activities as “stymieing school integration”. His own Vice President running mate, Kamala Harris, called him out for supporting anti busing and hindering integration.
During the anti busing hearings Biden said “Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have got to make some move on this.”
At the dawn of the 1970s Northern schools still remained thoroughly segregated. Housing segregation frequently produced segregated schools, and many urban school boards enacted transfer and redistricting policies to keep them that way. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, African American parents in the North filed lawsuits in protest. They alleged that their children had been denied equal educational opportunity, forced to attend schools that were underfunded and racially segregated.
The first busing case to reach the Supreme Court was Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. A district court had ordered busing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the plan in April 1971, on the grounds that the Constitution required “the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation.”
The Swann ruling and the court orders that followed triggered a swift backlash. White parents trembled with rage as they envisioned scenarios in which their children would be bused into African American neighborhoods. Elected officials came out against busing, while still insisting they supported integration. Yet few ever offered an alternative for how to achieve it.
As white voters around the country — especially in the North — objected to sweeping desegregation plans then coming into practice, liberal leaders retreated from robust integration policies.
In 1974 Bidens home state of Delaware was facing desegregation plans, the white parents became furious. Delaware residents formed the New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association in order to resist desegregation.
That June, the group organized an event at the Krebs School in Newport, Delaware — as Brett Gadsden details in Between North and South. The event’s coordinator had recently declared, “We’re going to hound Biden for the next four years if he doesn’t vote our position.”
As racial tension and violence over integration increased across the country a new national debate on capitol hill ensued. Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina and an open segregationist and White supremacist was the first to strike. On September 17, 1975, when a larger education bill came up for debate, Helms offered a crippling anti-integration amendment.
It would prevent the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from collecting any data about the race of students or teachers. In addition, HEW could not “require any school … to classify teachers or students by race.” Thus, HEW could not withhold funding from school districts that refused to integrate. “This is an antibusing amendment,” Helms explained. “This is an amendment to stop the current regiments of faceless, federal bureaucrats from destroying our schools.”
For the record Jesse Helms was an open segregationist, racist and white supremacist. In 1966 he mailed 125,000 fliers to heavily Black districts in North Carolina saying African-Americans would be imprisoned if they voted. He referred to UNC — the University of North Carolina — as the University of Negroes and Communists, conducted a 16-day filibuster against establishing the Martin Luther King federal holiday, opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Biden rose to support Helms’ amendment. “I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues … that a senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports [the Helms amendment].” Helms replied that he was happy to welcome Biden “to the ranks of the enlightened.
We can speculate but when an open segregationist and white supremacist says “ranks of the enlightened” he’s dog whistling about supporting white supremacy.
After the laughter died down, Biden launched an anti-busing screed. “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept.” The Senate should declare busing a failure and focus instead on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.”
Brooke sprung to action. The Helms amendment would eviscerate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Brooke said, which enabled HEW to cut off funding to school districts that refused to integrate.
Brooke asserted that the federal government should attempt other integration remedies before resorting to busing. “But if compliance with the law cannot be achieved without busing, then busing must be one of the available desegregation remedies”. Brooke introduced a motion to table Helms’ amendment. Brooke’s motion passed, 48–43.
Biden wouldn’t budge, and voted with Jesse Helms and the anti-bussers.
Immediately after the Helms amendment was tabled, Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.”
His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.”
He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”
By this point Biden had recruited other liberals to turn against integration including, Senator Robert Byrd the former grand wizard of the KKK, It passed the Senate by a vote of 51–45.
Perhaps Brooke foresaw the new political consensus that would take shape in the ensuing decades: Liberals would pay homage to the civil rights movement and its dream of integration, but refrain from championing the legislation that would make that dream a reality.
Few white Northerners viewed busing as a way to provide equal opportunity for black children. In fact, by the mid-1970s, whites viewed themselves as the aggrieved party when it came to busing.
They believed that African Americans had already won their rights with the civil rights bills of the previous decade. With little regard or care for whether African American children would be confined to segregated schools,Whites thought their rights were violated if their children couldn’t attend “neighborhood schools.”
Remember history repeats itself and this mindset a lot of white liberals have disguised behind “school choice”. Trump uses Joe Biden’s talking points when he panders about the suburbs and parents should have the right to send kids where they want, it’s the same dog whistling Joe Biden used 40 years ago to hinder integration.
Unfortunately this is just the tip of the ice berg of Joe Biden supporting anti black regulations. This includes the “war on drugs’ and mass incarceration. Those will be addressed in the next article.
Interesting this information can also be found on liberal media sites, not some alt right conspiracy theorist. Vote how you feel you must vote this November, but also don’t take an ethical/moral victory lap either.
