On Tuesday night, former vice president and maybe 2020 Democratic candidate, Joe Biden offered a sort-of apology and a reflection on why he had failed to do more to stand up for Anita Hill almost thirty years earlier. Condemning “a white man’s culture” and calling for broad cultural change, Biden’s forceful remarks generated plenty of media attention and criticism for not dealing more directly with his role and clear ability to have “done something” as the then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Biden’s words, aside from rehashing his own culpability, also put front and center the broader cultural reckoning facing the country about our own past — a reckoning that reverberates quite clearly with Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” chock-full of nostalgia for days that were far worse for large portions of the country.
Biden’s remarks hinted at but didn’t quite capture something that Americana country star Jason Isbell wrote about in his haunting song “White Man’s World.” He provides an illustrative rendering of what, I would hope, had been Biden’s goal to convey to his audience:
I’ve got the bones of the red man under my feet
The highway runs through their burial grounds
Past the oceans of cotton
The song continues:
Wishing I’d never been one of the guys
Who pretended not to hear another white man’s joke
Oh, the times ain’t forgotten
Isbell takes responsibility, placing himself, as “I” well within the “white man’s culture,” that Biden never quite admits is his. In his lyrics, Isbell grapples with past, with the privileges he gained from an unequal system and demands that the listener do the same.
Isbell’s song is a more direct and personal take on the themes of racism in the American south explored in 1970 in Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” The cultural response of course came from the thundering southern rock anthem of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” which makes clear that Young’s criticism was unwelcome singing, ”I hope Neil Young will remember, A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”
Trump has much the same answer today as Skynyrd did in 1973. If Biden hopes to be the man to challenge that, he’d do well to listen to Isbell’s words and find his “I” in the “white man’s culture” he has so much to say about.
