Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker revealed that he had recently had a phone call with Joe Biden regarding their recent public disagreement relating to recent comments made by Biden relating to his positive reflection of working with segregationists.
Biden raised eyebrows among Democrats when he recently described in a positive light his past relationship with former Democratic Sen. James O. Eastland, who supported segregation. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said of the late senator. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
Booker publicly called for Biden to apologize for using the term “boy,” which he felt was a racist epithet. When reporters confronted Biden with Booker’s call for apology, the former vice president bristled and suggested that Booker should apologize. “[Booker] knows better. Not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career. Period. Period. Period.”
During a Thursday night appearance on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” Sen. Booker characterized the phone call as being about 15 or 20 minutes long, with neither man offering an explicit apology, though he declined to relate specific details of the phone call.
Booker said, “I don’t want to characterize a private conversation … I don’t feel like I want an apology to me, I think this is something he should speak to the public about.”
“At the end of the day it’s not about me and it’s not about him … I have respect for him, I have love for him, and gratitude to him.”
When O’Donnell pressed Booker for further details of his conversation with Biden, he said, “I had an opportunity to explain to him further how and why African Americans, men who have been called ‘boy’ before. Why racist senators like those would look at him and call him ‘son’ as seeing themselves in him. See in a black man and call them ‘boy’ because they don’t see themselves, but they see someone they are dehumanizing or degrading. And so having conversations like that is the dialogue that is a constructive thing. I appreciate that.”
O’Donnell then questioned whether Booker would be willing to share a presidential ticket with Joe Biden to which Booker responded that no Democratic ticket should have two men, as that would not reflect his values on diversity.
