Joe Biden is old, but so are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Bernie shows his age, although he’s an energetic curmudgeon. Warren has aged more gracefully as they say, and has so much energy that she seems much younger than her years. Joe seems old because he’s been in national politics for so long. After all, this is the third time he’s run for president.

Biden is riding an African American high; his presence recalls fond memories of Barack for the Black community, a comfort in these times of craziness. He plans to use that cape to shield him from attacks by other more progressive contenders. But few people are familiar with his politics before Obama scooped him up, for the express purpose of holding the white working class within the Democratic coalition. In case people hadn’t noticed, he wasn’t all that successful at preventing his core support from wandering over to the Tea Party or just avoiding the polls. 

Kamala Harris highlighted some of Joe’s politics with her debate remarks about bussing to integrate primarily northern schools. Not only was Biden on the wrong side, taking refuge in local and states rights arguments, he refused to disavow his position today. If students have to wait on Biden cronies to abandon their prejudices against Black students in their white schools, no integration is going to happen in their neighborhoods. After all, they ran to the suburbs to get away from Black people moving in next door. They moved to those cozy suburbs to leave those Black students behind. If the schools don’t remain “good”, what happens to the home values that they’ve nursed along until they could retire to Florida or Arizona? The restrictive covenants are no accident.

Older African Americans, Biden’s core, have little real belief that their schools will get better. In their minds, Biden is not more flawed than any of the other candidates they’ve seen. They have hope, the spirit of the Black community that makes life bearable despite the daily assaults on all fronts, but they’re not betting on change. They just want to get back to a state of slow, steady progress rather than the leaps backward we’re seeing today. 

But Black millennials tend not to be so patient; they are not so enthusiastic. Unwilling to go with more of the same, Biden’s nomination may cause some to sit out the general election despite the overwhelming sense of urgency among the more politically active. Many Gen X- and Y-ers are tuning out as the Democratic primaries unfold. There are a number of rationales. They think government isn’t listening and thus is unresponsive; government is corrupted by money and special interests; elections are rigged, recognizing the truth in the triumvirate of gerrymandering, voter suppression and the electoral college that has delivered minority over majority rule to Republicans. For the party, faced with the opportunity to break new progressive ground, to settle for a back to pre-Trump candidate only plays into the cynicism of younger voters for the political process.

But Biden has a lot more skeletons in his closet. One big one is his handling of Anita HIll in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. Thomas played the race card just right; he backed liberals into a corner by calling Hill’s allegations “a lynching for uppity Blacks.” Demonstrating that liberals’ commitment to Black civil rights, even if it was for an Uncle Tom like Thomas, far outstripped their theoretical commitment to women, they had to denigrate Hill so they could ignore her. Liberals have never been that discerning about Uncle Tom’s anyway. Biden for his part did some back door dealing to arrange the scheduling of witnesses before his committee to disadvantage Hill and to deliver the confirmation vote.

Many may be familiar with Biden’s support of various law and order bills, like third strike that spurred the wholesale incarceration of Black and LatinX men building the prison industrial complex. While he has expressed regret for his role in further enhancing the criminal injustice system, his response to the question in the third debate about reparations, illustrates his core beliefs.

“It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do…. make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone — make sure that kids hear words.”

Biden ended his response with “…bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background — will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.” It wasn’t a gaff; it wasn’t simply that he fell back on political spin he’s used in the past. He has no filter, the source of his infamous gaffs, letting him say what he’s thinking, even when he doesn’t mean to. 

Biden’s just assumed that Black people are poor. He’s done this before during the campaign in a speech, saying “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”, implying that Black kids are the poor. He tried to fix it by adding “Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids — no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”  Actually, he meant how he  and his cronies think of it; there are wealthy Asian and Black kids and there are poor Asian, white and Black kids. LatinX, Asian and Black people understand that very well. He used racial categorizations to characterize individuals in each group. But in the context of a debate question about reparations, Biden had to be talking about African Americans.

Even more strikingly, Biden is attributing bad educational outcomes to the students themselves, right after he mentioned institutional segregation and redlining in real estate and bank loans. He proposed tripling Title I school funding and raising teacher salaries. Great, until he launched into regurgitation of the bad sociology of the 80s and 90s. The media fixated on the reference to record players, blithely encased in their middle class cocoons absent the understanding that there are vast rural areas in the west, midwest and south without internet access where poor folks aren’t streaming music and their phones are pay-as-you-go burners. Many a grandparent does enjoy their record player, either parenting full time (remember the opioid crisis, so it applies to whites and Blacks) or providing daycare. 

With record players center stage, the debunked statistics went unchallenged. Few in the mainstream media tackled the paternalistic assumption that if only social workers can teach  Black parents how to parent, their children will graduate from high school and college at comparable rates to whites. Apparently, food insecurity, violence in their communities, lack of school resources, biased disciplinary actions from teachers, tracking normal students into special needs classes can all be overcome by social workers tutoring parents so they know what to do. He didn’t wander into another historic talking point, lack of a father in the home, again just as common in white homes as in Black homes. But old Joe can take some of the credit for the absence of fathers. 

A lot of fathers are in jail or essentially unemployable in a decent job that supports a family on their release. Not that they live in areas brimming with economic opportunity, even with the lowest Black unemployment in 50 years. A closer look at the statistics will show that there are still many neighborhoods where unemployment still hovers between 10 and 20%. In Black majority cities like New Orleans, the African American unemployment rate is 11.5%; Atlanta, 11.3% while white unemployment rates of 2.5% and 2.3%. In Macon Georgia, the Black unemployment rate is 11.5%. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/06/26/black-workers-are-being-left-behind-by-full-employment/.

Are there differences from middle class social conventions that many poor, as opposed to only African Americans, share? In fact, it is white expectation and perception of variant behavior that begins a cascade of events that end in economic distress.

Are there differences from middle class social conventions that many poor, as opposed to only African Americans, share? In Hillbilly Elegy, J D Vance lays out quite a few variations within Appalachian culture that keep that community impoverished. Besides, Bill Gates and Donald Trump are examples of very successful people who didn’t comply with prevailing norms. Of course, 45’s behavior represents the criminal outliers where lying and cheating dominate a narcissistic pursuit of personal aggrandizement that is usually described as anti-social and punished. Compliance with conventions can be learned in the social marketplace, what Blacks call code-switching, if only poor Black kids weren’t burdened with the additional obstacles of racial bias and systemic racism. Old Joe acknowledged “systematic segregation” without apparently recognizing that it’s well entrenched in all American institutions and more importantly in minds like his. 

Perhaps, it is workplace culture that should be changed. Restrictions on natural African American hair styles including braids have been instituted in the military, where women say uniformly that it makes hair care much easier, particularly when stationed in places where no black hair salons are available. The military demands a neat appearance; apparently if it ain’t white; it ain’t neat. Issues are Black styling are not uncommon; if they are not restricted, they impact personnel evaluations.  

But workplace structure is not immutable; Silicon Valley has recreated workplaces in the tech world leading to better productivity. We don’t know how automation, typically reconfiguring workplaces in its wake will impact future jobs. FYI, Amazon has moved in the other direction for the non-tech workers. They’ve tightened their workplace restrictions to create even more inhospitable environments so that workers don’t get bathroom breaks. Facebook adjudicators of inappropriate content are forced to work long shifts watching psychologically damaging videos from snuff porn to beheadings and simulated violence, without bathroom breaks or psychological counseling. Of course these workers are in the Philippines and Southeast Asia where companies think workplace conditions don’t count because people will work for any near decent wage.  

In fact, it is white expectation and perception of variant behavior that begins a cascade of events that end in economic distress. Black boys are believed to be bigger, older and more aggressive than their white counterparts, ideas still with us from slave days. This causes white teachers to more severely discipline them more often, resulting in more assignments to special needs classes where they get bored and give up. In regular classes, lower expectations of Black students by teachers who are 85% white, undermine their best school performance. Students carry a sense of societal ostracism, reinforced by police harassment that makes for frustrated, hostile, men, angry at life. Their guilt over their failure stokes that anger. All of this is backed by extensive research.

In contrast, middle class Blacks, of which there are many, are less able to pass their class advantages onto their children. They have less choice of good housing and therefore schools; they have less wealth, as opposed to income, which can squeeze their offspring into the higher circles of influence where Biden lives. They are less able to pass their status and wealth on to their offspring.  

Here again, older Black Americans may not be perturbed by Biden’s assertions. They’ve heard these arguments before, from LBJ, Ronald Reagan and even Bill Cosby back in the day when he was a good guy. Many don’t like the gangsta stance with droopy pants; they think it misrepresents the race as outside the bounds of middle class norms that they studiously observed to try to get ahead. Never mind that middle class whites and the fashion industry have enthusiastically co-opted it. Older African Americans have accepted a measured, back and forth pace of progress toward equality. Younger people of color are less patient. Having grown up with THE Black president, they watched a racist response they hadn’t envisioned, thinking that racial progress moved in a straight line. And then the bottom fell out with the emergence of MAWA; they realize that the genie is out of the bottle and going back with Biden to Obama days is not enough. They want to move forward by leaps and bounds. 

If this is how Biden thinks about the problem of bad schools, his solutions will not include attacking the continuing segregation in 80% of Black children in schools or the residential and financial components that maintain that distribution. If he insists that disparities for Black communities are there fault rather than associated with systemic institutional racism.  That idea cripples his ability to make any meaningful change on other issues, like the economy, trade or climate change, which will consider the racial implications of the cause and the solutions including the collateral disadvantaging of minorities.

 The usual price African Americans have to pay in elections is what I call the Tweedle Dum-Tweedle Dee effect; no party has ever had our backs so we have to find the one that will do us the least harm. Since Richard Nixon took the GOP on the Southern Strategy path, we’ve been tethered to the Democratic Party which could safely ignore our concerns knowing we didn’t have another choice. The response of many is to stay home. However, the current crop of Democratic candidates offers the broadest range of choices ever in history. It would be a shame to throw it away by settling for Old Joe, in the name of electibilty. But then again, if the Dems feel compelled to cater to the white working class, steeped in their white privilege, it’s just one more step backward.

September 27, 1958 Little Rock Arkansas citizens voted to close public schools rather than integrate them. Schools remained closed for one year.