The social justice-driven mauling of Joe Biden continues. After the former vice president said at the Democratic presidential debate last week that our never-ending apology for slavery should focus on black families and education, social justice liberals rose from their coffins to claim their pound of flesh.
Biden had transgressed Democratic Party dogma that explicitly states: No white man shall speak to the ills and trials of the aggrieved (in this case, black people). The absolute best Biden could have done in his situation was to do what every other Democrat running for president is doing, which is to make some vague promise about a “panel” or “commission” that will then “study” reparations.
Sens. Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar have all made that condescending pledge, and they’re all sitting pretty. But Biden made the mistake of proposing real, tangible solutions to wrecked black families. That leaves him two burst blood vessels away from being labeled a full-blown klansman.
Liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow said Sunday that Biden’s “positioning on racial issues” is “problematic.” White guy Ryan Grim at The Intercept said Biden’s answer at the debate was an example of “blatant racism.” Friday on MSNBC, so-called political analyst Zerlina Maxwell said Biden’s answer was “tone deaf,” “completely out of touch,” and “wildly offensive.” Later in the same segment, she again called the comment “tone deaf.”
The issue initially raised at the debate was already stupid. One of the moderators asked for Biden to account for something he had said about reparations nearly 50 years ago — “I’’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago” — and how Americans generally should “repair” the “legacy of slavery.”
Biden’s answer was difficult to follow, but it can basically summed up as: Black families are too broken down and repairing them means committing resources to education and parenting. “We bring social workers into homes and [to] parents to help them deal with how to raise their children,” he said. “[T]hey don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure … you have the record player on at night. Make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”
Problems with the black family are real and social scientists, scholars, and researches have documented them all at great length over the course of several decades. It’s a fact that 70% of black children are born out of wedlock, a rate that’s astronomically higher than any other group in the United States. Furthermore, 66% of black single mothers don’t have a high school diploma, compared with only 18% of white single mothers.
Princeton professor Sara McLanahan and Harvard professor Christopher Jencks digested those depressing numbers in a 2015 paper, writing that “a father’s absence lowers children’s educational attainment … by disrupting their social and emotional adjustment and reducing their ability or willingness to exercise self-control.”
The Washington Post in 2014 wrote, “the disadvantages of education are much more severe for black children” raised by single mothers.
These are facts that can’t be acknowledged in today’s Democratic Party. Point them out and you’re a racist.
This was always going to be a problem for Biden. There’s nothing worse than being born white in today’s Democratic Party, and that goes double if you’re a man. The terrain for whites and men is dotted with landmines that can only be skirted by way of issuing endless pathetic apologies in the vein of Beto O’Rourke. Incidentally, it doesn’t seem to have done him much good.
Biden has already apologized for being white, for having touched women on their shoulders in public, and for the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, which Biden voted against.
Now he’s expected to submit to the social justice mob for having proposed a solution to real black problems, which amounts to more than just giving away free money with no strings attached.
The truth about reparations and racial justice is that their advocates have no feasible policy proposals to address either. The reality is that both issues, to the extent that we can seriously call them “issues,” exist purely for the purpose of perpetually reminding America that “victims” reign supreme in our national discourse, and should be regarded with utmost reverence.
As described in my forthcoming book, Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, oppression, grievance, and victimhood now set the tone for everything in the Democratic Party. And no amount of submission or self-abasement is ever enough.
As Charles Blow wrote on Monday, there is nothing Biden or anyone can do to truly atone for slavery. “[A] fact is a fact,” wrote Blow, “and no amount of growth, change, or well-intentioned good-heartedness has the ability to erase it.”
We should drop the issue altogether, because the social justice crowd was never interested in finding a solution. They were only ever interested in reminding Biden and the rest of us of who’s in charge.
