We have all heard the remark that people of other ethnicities than one’s own “all look the same.” Former Vice President Joe Biden apparently thinks that way. Biden, who has all but wrapped up the Democratic Party nomination for president, speaking at a virtual campaign event on Wednesday (Biden rarely makes in-person appearances choosing instead to campaign from his basement) to the left-wing Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said to home care provider Suk Kim, “Don’t let anybody convince you you’re not American in every single way.” Suk Kim emigrated from South Korea four decades ago.
Biden continued, saying, “It’s an idea. We’re an idea. It’s not based on an ethnicity or race. I’m sorry I get so worked up about it, but it makes me angry when I find people based on the color of their skin or their national origin are somehow viewed in a different way.”
Biden then used that premise to accuse President Donald Trump of bigotry for referring to Covid-19 as the “China virus.”
“Look what he’s doing now,” Biden said. “He’s blaming everything on China. He’s blaming everything on the Chinese … and people don’t make a distinction, as you well know, from a South Korean and someone from Beijing. They make no distinction, it’s Asian. And he’s using it as a wedge.”
Biden says Trump is wrong to hold China accountable for coronavirus because Americans can’t distinguish “between a South Korean and someone from Beijing.”
The patronizing view of voters aside, not sure what that has to do with the CCP, or anything. pic.twitter.com/hWUbIRK910
— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) July 22, 2020
Biden offered no evidence — because there isn’t any — that either Trump nor “people” in general make “no distinction” between different ethnicities in East Asia, such as Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese.
Perhaps Biden is projecting his own prejudices onto Trump, in particular, and the American people, generally. Biden certainly seems to think about race and ethnicity much more than the average American citizen. For example, Biden told the Asian & Latino Coalition in Des Moines, Iowa, early in the campaign, that “poor kids are just as bright” as White children. “We should challenge students in these schools and have advanced placement programs in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it.”
Biden added, “Wealthy kids, Black kids, Asian kids, no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”
Perhaps the “we” is just Joe Biden. Notice that Biden considered a “wealthy” kid a White kid, and a “poor” kid a Black, Asian, or Hispanic kid, all by default.
Biden’s hang-up with classifying individuals by their race or ethnicity is not new, and it does not appear that he is going to change how “we [at least Biden] think about it.”
Multiple examples of Biden’s race hang-up could be offered, such as his 2006 remark, captured on a C-SPAN video, when he told a supporter of East Indian ancestry, “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking!”
Some might also remember Biden’s odd remark in 2008 that Senator Barack Obama was the first Black candidate to run for president who was “clean” and “articulate.” Al Sharpton, a Black preacher who had made his own run for president, responded that he was also clean, because he took a bath every day.
Recently, Biden appeared on the radio show The Breakfast Club with the Black host Charlamagne tha God, and insisted that any Black person who even considered voting for Trump was not really Black. As the interview was drawing to a close, Charlamagne invited Biden to come back again. “Listen, you’ve got to come see us when you come to New York, Vice President Biden. It’s a long way until November. We’ve got more questions.”
“You’ve got more questions?” Biden responded testily. “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black,” adding that the voters should “take a look at my record, man!”
Paris Dennard, a Black man who voted for Trump in 2016, and plans to do so again in 2020, took to the opinion pages of USA TODAY to challenge that assertion. “No 77-year-old White man from Delaware has the right, authority or rationale to question my blackness or the blackness of millions of Americans exercising their God-given right to be free and exercise our constitutionally granted power to vote for whomever we want, even if they are Republican.”
Dennard explained his support for Trump, as a Black man: “Thanks to President Trump’s courageous leadership pushing for historic criminal justice reform and signing the First Step Act into law, he helped reverse the pain and suffering many Black men and women experienced because of Biden’s bill.” Dennard was referencing the 1994 crime bill that has been described by the Center for American Progress as a “school-to-prison pipeline,” which “increased racial disparities in juvenile justice involvement by creating draconian penalties for so-called super predators — low-income children of color, especially Black children, who are convicted of multiple crimes.”
Biden is, of course, not the only politician who has an apparent hang-up about race and ethnicity, publicly claiming that all sorts of issues should be filtered through that lens. But criticizing the Chinese Communist Party for their role in creating the Covid-19 pandemic is in no way being critical of the Chinese people themselves. Making opposition to a totalitarian Communist regime the equivalent to anti-Asian bigotry is a pretty despicable way to try to win an election. Saying that the average White American makes no distinction between the Chinese government and its people, or between Chinese and other Asian peoples, such as those in South Korea, is at once both insulting and without evidence.
Biden is rather quick to attribute certain characteristics to all members of certain ethnic and racial groups, which is the very definition of racism and ethnic bigotry. Perhaps when Joe Biden is railing about such prejudicial attitudes, he should remember the words of Scripture. Before one tries to take the speck out of another person’s eye, perhaps he should get the log out of his own.
Image: screenshot from video interview
Steve Byas is a university instructor in history and government, and author of History’s Greatest Libels. He may be contacted at [email protected].
