Biden should not get away with cynical use of race

President Joe Biden is “down” with Black voters and I’m not using street slang. A USA Today/Suffolk University Poll reveals

1 in 5 Black voters say they will support a third-party candidate instead of the president. That’s down substantially from the 92% of non-Hispanic Blacks who voted for Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.

The president’s strategy for shoring up his and Democrats’ most loyal supporters? Telling them their biggest threat is “white supremacy.”

Nothing about the failing schools in which so many poor and minority children feel trapped; or violence in big cities that kill many young Black men; or the disproportionate abortion rate among Black women that has kept their percentage of the population mostly stagnant; or the necessity of putting more Black fathers in homes to provide loving discipline to their children.

Biden has a long history of using race as a political weapon while doing little to improve the lives of Black Americans.

Speaking at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., where in 2015 a white gunman shot and killed nine members of a Bible study, Biden again demonstrated his insincerity about race by making statements that have been proved false.

He claimed to have been a civil rights activist. He wasn’t. He claimed to have “spent more time in the Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Del., than most people I know, Black or white.”

He hasn’t. He also claimed that church was “where I started a civil rights movement.” He didn’t.

As a New York Post editorial noted, “(Biden has) pushed such baloney time and again.” He has claimed to have been arrested during civil rights demonstrations and while on the way to see Nelson Mandela in prison. Neither is true.

Biden claimed to have persuaded segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Wrong on two counts. Thurmond did not vote for the act and Biden was not in the Senate in 1964.

There was also his 2006 remark: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” In 2020, he said if Blacks didn’t vote for him “you ain’t Black.” In 2010, he warmly eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, saying he was “one of my mentors” and that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” As early as 1977, Biden said that forced busing to desegregate schools would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.” In 2007, he referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”

So many more examples, but not enough space.

Democrats have played the race card for decades, even blaming poor performances (see former Harvard President Claudine Gay) on bigotry, not plagiarism and a failure to denounce antisemitic campus demonstrations. Their talk has been cheap and the results negligible. One wonders why so many still vote for them given their record. White Democrats only show up in Black churches at election time and are not seen for another two or four years. Shouldn’t that tell them something?

White supremacy is a minority view. Christians call it a sin. There are no pure-bred people. We are all mixed up in the great gene pool of life, as scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has brilliantly demonstrated in PBS programs on African American lives. To hate another person because of their race is to hate a part of one’s self.

Given Biden’s declining poll numbers, especially among young Black voters, it would appear they are starting to figure out how Democrats have duped them for decades. Biden’s out-of-touch speech in Charleston is likely to do little to improve the situation.