Biden looks to contrast Trump in Kenosha visit
KENOSHA, Wis. — Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wis., recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism. The Democrat sought to draw a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a racial reckoning
that has galvanized the nation.
“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old: … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Mr. Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Mr. Blake and his family.
The visit marked the former vice president’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee. While Mr. Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family, Mr. Trump didn’t mention Mr. Blake during his own trip to Kenosha on Tuesday. Where Mr. Biden traced problems in the criminal justice system back to slavery, Mr. Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism and offered his unvarnished support to law enforcement, blaming the recent violence on “domestic terror.”
“I can’t say if tomorrow God made me president, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Mr. Biden said. But “it would be a whole heck of a lot better. We’d get a whole lot further down the road” if Mr. Trump isn’t re- elected.
“There’s certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to — but we’re not going to lose.”
Mr. Biden spoke with Mr. Blake on the phone for 15 minutes. Mr. Biden says Mr. Blake “talked about how nothing was going to defeat him, about how whether he walked again or not, he was not going to give up.”
Mr. Blake remains hospitalized after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him on Aug. 23. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.
Outside Grace Lutheran, Mr. Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s respective visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.
Justin Blake called Mr. Biden “more of a unifier” and credited the Democrat for bringing up criminal justice changes before being asked. But Justin Blake said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”
Mr. Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered searing accounts of their struggles.
Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Mr. Biden she’s “tired” at just 31 years old and worried for her three young, Black children. “For so many decades, we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding she’s heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”
Mr. Biden answered, saying because he’s white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”
But he compared the current era of cellphone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil rights protesters being beaten more than a half- century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Mr. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non- whites.
“I think the country is much more primed to take responsibility because they now have seen what you see,” Mr. Biden told Ms. Bennett, the community organizer.
Barb DeBerge, owner of DeBerge Framing & Gallery, told Mr. Biden of the deep pain exposed by the protests and how it has reached many business owners whose establishments have been burned. Ms. DeBerge noted her shop still stands but said, “I just don’t think I really grieved as much as I should because being a business owner, I have to keep going, I have to keep working.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he’d asked both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump not to come. “I would prefer that no one be here, be it candidate Trump or candidate Biden,” Mr. Evers said in a news conference.