How the president’s determined insistence upon the American system’s irreparable flaws heals the racial divide is anyone’s guess.
Joe Biden ascended to cruising altitude over the weekend to issue a comprehensive critique of the evil lurking in his fellow countrymen’s hearts. In a commencement address before the student body at the historically black Howard University, Biden took the measure of American history and found much of it wanting.
The story of American life “has not always been a fairytale,” the president said of the straw man he came to bury. It is a narrative of constant struggle between “the best of us” and “the worst of us,” symbolic of the “harsh reality that racism has always torn us apart.” Speaking of the permanent conflict for the soul of the nation, Biden said it demands that Americans of good faith “stand up against the poison of white supremacy,” as he has. He reiterated that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
Biden’s elision of the word “domestic” from his identification of white nationalists as the nation’s primary terroristic adversary forecloses on invoking the FBI statistics that might have justified a narrower claim. But to include this qualifier would have taken all the sting out of the president’s contention, which, despite his explicit insistence that his comments were not audience-dependent, was likely designed to reinforce negative racial assumptions.
Joe Biden long ago sacrificed the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his forays into racial agitation. We don’t need to sift through the annals of history for examples of his reflexive race-baiting — the notion that Republicans sought to put black Americans “back in chains,” the idea that African Americans who declined to vote for him “ain’t black,” the implicit contrast between Barack Obama, an “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” and other “mainstream African American” political leaders. We need only look at the president’s record in his first term in office.
What has Joe Biden “done to improve the lives of African Americans,” radio host Rickey Smiley asked the president last year. The president could have said any number of things, but what leapt to his mind was his blanket pardoning of Americans convicted of “possession of marijuana.” It might have been a grandfatherly lapse into negative stereotypes, but negative stereotypes form the basis of the administration’s efforts to, per Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice, embed “racial equity into everything it does.”
Equity as a concept flattens three-dimensional human beings into racial caricatures. It disregards the nuanced views of African Americans, among whom discrimination is certainly a concern and a political issue but not the foremost such issue. Still, the dogma of equity established the philosophical predicate that allowed Democrats to subvert the equal-protection clause in pursuit of, for example, federal grants available only to black farmers and to block out Covid relief only for small-business owners with the right identity. Applying discrimination today as a tool to remedy the ills of historic discrimination calls into question Biden’s commitment to progress.
The problem of discrimination persists even in its apparent absence, as Biden and his vice president evinced in the wake of the verdict that sent George Floyd’s murderer to jail. “The systemic racism is a stain on our nation’s soul,” Biden said. He emphasized the extent to which that killing “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” afflicting America while sidestepping the just remedy that the very system he attacked had just produced. How this determined insistence upon the American system’s irreparable flaws heals the racial divide is anyone’s guess.
The president prosecuted a relentless campaign against the State of Georgia on Stacey Abrams’s behalf — a state he won but that nevertheless committed itself to “the ongoing assault of voter suppression that represents a Jim Crow era in the 21st century.” It wasn’t true. Georgia voters turned out in larger numbers to vote early in 2022 than they had in 2018 and 2020. Black Georgians made up a larger share of the electorate than would match the state’s demography and expressed more confidence in the vote count than did their white counterparts.
All these initiatives and rhetorical flourishes keep the menace posed by white racial hostility fresh in the minds of the president’s constituencies — an odd proclivity if white supremacy is as pronounced a threat as the president claims.