In Kenosha visit, Biden emphasizes his commitment to healing, unity
KENOSHA, Wis. — Drawing a contrast with President Donald Trump, Joe Biden on Thursday aligned himself with protesters of racial injustice and with Black voters during an afternoon of raw interactions with people still grappling with the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Two days after Trump traveled to Kenosha to focus attention on street violence and disorder, Biden sought to strike a different tone, as he repudiated the president’s divisive approach to matters of racial injustice and civil unrest and offered an alternative vision focused on national unity.
In his first day of campaigning outside his home state of Delaware or neighboring Pennsylvania since the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, Biden met for about an hour with Blake’s family and legal team immediately after landing in the critical battleground state of Wisconsin, and spoke with Blake himself by phone.
Biden also hosted a listening session with activists, elected officials, clergy members, businesspeople and a few law enforcement officers, aiming to appeal to a broader cross-section of the community than Trump did on his trip. The former vice president emphasized his commitment to correcting decades of systemic racism, as he acknowledged racial disparities in health care, educa
tion and the criminal justice system and said that “we’re finally now getting to the point” of addressing “the original sin: slavery. And all the vestiges of it.”
“Win or lose, I’m going to go down fighting,” Biden said as he described the possibility of a more just future. “I’m going to go down fighting for racial equality, equity across the board.”
He also took pains to warn against violent expressions of anger, regardless of “how angry you are.”
Biden spoke in a relatively spare sanctuary at Grace Lutheran Church, with some stained-glass images dotting the walls. He listened as a Black lawyer discussed racism in the legal system. A white store owner praised the community spirit of a close-knit city even as she described the experience of her business being looted. And Porche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists of Kenosha, drew applause after she described the challenges and bias many Black Americans face in their daily lives.
Biden, who took notes during the remarks, at times paced by the pews as he responded, hitting notes of optimism as he declared that this was a moment to “cut another slice off institutional racism.”
“There are certain things worth losing over, and this is something worth losing over if we have to,” Biden said of combating injustice, quickly adding, “But we’re not going to lose.”
The scene and substance of the discussion provided a contrast to Trump’s visit Tuesday. The president did not meet with the Blake family or grapple with the issues of police brutality or racism. Instead he met with local law enforcement leaders and delivered a message of protesters run amok, and of “looters” and “rioters” he said were cowing liberal politicians. He rejected the idea of systemic racism while expressing empathy with police officers who he said have a dangerous job.
While several law enforcement members were listed as participants in the meeting, Biden’s event did not focus on the police perspective in the way that Trump’s trip did.
Biden sought to underscore promises that have animated his campaign from the beginning: that he can restore civility and steadiness at a polarized and perilous moment for the nation, and that Trump is an incendiary figure who escalates already fraught situations and emboldens bigots.
“Not all his fault, but it legitimizes,” he said of Trump’s messaging. “It legitimizes a dark side of human nature.”
Trump on Thursday mocked Biden’s visit and took credit for restoring order in Wisconsin. “Biden went there today,” the president told supporters at an evening rally in Latrobe, Pa. “There was nobody there! He was a little late. I was like, we ended that problem.”
Biden’s appearance came as Republicans have mounted an onslaught designed to cast him as a weak leader incapable of stopping lawlessness in the streets, a message that has worried some of Biden’s Democratic allies in the days since the Republican National Convention.
On Monday, to the relief of some of his supporters, Biden moved to vigorously reject that characterization, insisting in a speech in Pittsburgh: “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting.” He included that message in a new ad, part of a $45 million one-week television and digital advertising purchase, the campaign’s largest to date.
He repeated a version of those points again Thursday, warning, “If you loot or you burn, you should be held accountable.”
“It just cannot be tolerated, across the board,” he added.
But he spent much of his appearance at the church, which stretched for more than an hour, expressing empathy for Black Americans. “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 may not come back,” Biden said, to nods in the audience.
Earlier in the day, at Biden’s meeting with Blake’s family members, Jacob Blake’s mother said a prayer, which Biden later recalled: “She said, ‘I’m praying for Jacob, but I’m praying for the policeman as well. I’m praying that things change.’ ”
Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who suffered serious injuries in the shooting, spoke by telephone and “shared about the pain he is enduring, and the vice president commiserated,” said a lawyer for the Blake family, Benjamin Crump.
Biden said of the meeting, “What I came away with was the overwhelming sense of resilience and optimism that they have about the kind of response they’re getting.”
Kenosha has been rocked by protests since the police shooting of Blake, and some demonstrations have turned destructive. A white teenager who has expressed support for Trump was charged with homicide after two people were shot to death during clashes, and the president later defended him.
While the city of Kenosha leans heavily Democratic, the surrounding county is far more politically mixed, and voters of a range of political persuasions were on hand near the church where Biden held his community meeting.
April Valdez hung a large Trump 2020 banner on her porch. Valdez, who is white and has lived in Kenosha since 2002, said the demonstrations grew so worrisome last month that she and her husband sent their three young children out of the area for about a week, fearing they would be hurt.
“Changewise, I unfortunately think anything Democratic-handled at this point is going to put us further into destruction,” she said.
As she spoke, a small crowd gathered in Civic Center Park in Kenosha, across from the county courthouse, and began to march in the direction of the church where Biden was expected, chanting and waving a Black Lives Matter flag.
Vaun Mayes, a Milwaukee activist, was one of the Black leaders in the crowd. He intended to vote for Biden in November, he said, though he disagreed with Biden’s record on incarceration and prosecuting nonviolent crimes.
“I don’t know if we have any choice on voting for him,” he said. “We can’t stand four more years of Trump.”
The earlier church appearance was among Biden’s most sustained, unscripted engagements with voters in months, and there were a few off-key moments. He promised, in a city reeling from the shooting of Blake, that he would wrap up a tangent about taxes or else someone may “shoot me.” And as he urged a fuller accounting of American history in schools, he asked a room that included many African Americans, “Did anybody know before what’s recently happened, that Black Wall Street in Oklahoma was burned to the ground?”
But often, he sought to give attendees and viewers encouragement about their efforts to pursue racial justice, referring to some polling showing support for Black Lives Matter despite what he called Trump’s “rant about, you know, law and order.”
But Biden stressed that he was far from complacent. Without voting, he said, “nothing else works in a democracy. It doesn’t work.”