My intentions, initially at least, were to use this time and essay to prosecute the prosecutor, Kamala Harris. I thought, given her charisma, that the treachery of her past needed to be made immediately known. Further, never did I think that any effort would be required to get folk—especially Black folk—off the Joe Biden bandwagon. However, it seems as if we will have to give Madam Prosecutor a temporary “stay of execution.” Indeed, if I were to look either right or left I would see me, yes, because I am beside myself. Black people, what the hell is wrong with us? We cannot actually be planning on supporting Joe Biden, can we? If we do, and I do not say this hyperbolically, we may as well keep Trump, at least that clown entertains.
Some weeks ago, a few people got up in arms because Biden said that Eastland never called him boy, “he called me son.” Everyone cried foul about the word ‘boy,’ however, as a soon to be fifty-year old Black man I contend that the problem word in that statement was not ‘boy’ it was ‘son’. I do not have a son, but there are young men whom I refer to as son. Why? Because they are near to my heart, thus in this sense ‘son’ is a term of endearment. Admitting to being called son by racist and misogynistic bigots should have sounded the death knell for his campaign. One does not endear himself to, nor earn the affection of, people with whom they supposedly hold totally opposing views. Who is it that would contend that Goliath called David son? Any Roman/Italian historian, even one of the most sophomoric rank, will tell you that Scipio never called Hannibal son. Be assured that King George never referred to his namesake George Washington as son. These people were not in the same thought bubble, no pet names for each other, because they were on wholly different missions. Yet, Joe says that James Eastland called him “son.” That is huge. That should prove to be disqualifying. Is one to believe that Eastland called him son because he displayed his affinity for African Americans and justice to him? No, these types of blandishments are borne of shared experiences and innate philosophies.
Joe’s consorting with jackasses does not end with Eastland. I wonder how those who support him explain away Strom Thurmond requesting Joe to eulogize him, and more importantly, Joe honoring that request? Biden extolled at Thurmond’s funeral, “I looked into his heart and saw a man, a whole man.” (Biden, 2003) What the @#$%, are you kidding me? How can one be a whole man while denying the humanity of a whole segment of the population? No Joe, if you indeed looked into his heart you did not see a ‘whole man’, you saw a hole, man.
Joe went on and on in his eulogy about how this self-identified “son of the Confederacy” had changed. It did not matter to Joe that Strom, like all of his slave-holding forebears, had not changed enough to publicly acknowledge those Black children that he had fathered. Joe went on to say something that could prove to be faith changing, “I know that today a benevolent God has lifted his arms to Strom.” (Biden, 2003) If by some strange twist of life Joe is right on this latter point, I personally will be checking out the accommodations at that alternative destination. Moving on.
I ask you, dear reader, to riddle me this; tell me, is the following situation justice? A father dies, and he leaves his son all of his possessions which include, say, a very profitable chain of grocery stores. The stores are cash cows, have great clientele, and they afford their new owner an upper-class existence. The son is enjoying all of the benefits of his father’s investment and living the good life. There comes an occasion that his accountant tells him that there is a bill, a demand for payment, that has come due for meat that was purchased on consignment and has been sold. However, rather than cutting a check for the amount owed, the benefits that he has derived notwithstanding, he tells the accountant ‘I am not responsible…and I’ll be damned if I pay for what happened three months ago.’ Is this justice? Can the son actually inherit the profit from the stores and not the debt? No law degree is required to tell him that he must pay up.
The store that I mentioned is, of course, America. The “consignment” is the uncompensated labor extracted from Black people. The “son” is none other than Joe Biden, whose answer to reparations for slavery was, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather…. And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” (Terkel, 2019) Is this really our guy, Black people?
Researchers have uncovered something pretty damned scary. About 36% of White folk support the death penalty, however 52% strongly favor it when they learn that it is racially unfair. (Peffley & Hurwitz, 2007) Even, in the face of this evidence, Joe Biden had been a lifelong supporter of the death penalty. He checked the political winds a couple of hours ago, and suddenly he no longer supports it. Is this who you actually want in the Oval Office?
No public policy, in the last half century has been more detrimental to African Americans than “mass incarceration,” and no law has aided mass incarceration more than Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill which was drafted and supported by Joe Biden. Clinton said of the bill, “Hillary and I both feel a special indebtedness for the friendship and the leadership of Joe Biden…We are in his great and abiding debt.” (Caldwell, 2015) Mass incarceration and this crime bill not only proved to be destructive to the Black family, but too it served to hamper political power (and disenfranchised), wealth, educational attainment, birth rate, and over all contentment—even Newt Gingrich agrees, Newt effing Gingrich (check out the documentary “13th ”)! This crime bill was the work of Joe Biden, again, the worst thing since segregation will go down in the history books as the brain-child of Joe.
A vote for the aforementioned crime bill was nothing more than a vote for slavery, yes slavery. Slavery is still legal in prison:
Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime (emphasis added) whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
This crime bill called for 100,000 new prison beds, and Joe and Bill exceeded that goal by a country mile, by a Mason-Dixon mile. By the end of the Clinton presidency, one million additional Americans were behind bars. When Clinton took office there were approximately 1.1 million souls residing behind bars in America, but thanks in no small part to Joe’s crime bill, by the end of his second term that number had ballooned to 2.1 million. In 1964, before Jim Crow met his demise, two-thirds of the but 350,000 people who were in prison were white and it took all of the remaining minorities to make up the other 33%. But after Bill and Joe’s successful cloning of ‘Massah’ Crow the entire prison population grew 7-fold, and the group that made up but 6% of the American public—Black males—now represented a whopping 26% of those persons residing on the new plantation in America. Side bar: let’s do some quick math. 1 million additional inmates @ $36,000 per year x 25 years (since the passing of the bill) = damn near 1 Trillion (and counting) tax payer dollars. There’s your healthcare-for-all money.
No, I did not forget that I mentioned slavery. Neither did I mention slavery in an exaggerated fashion, like people so often do when comparing low lives to Hitler. These incarcerated Americans are in fact slaves, and serve as a whole new crop of uncompensated labor, not only for the state governments but for the likes of Chevron, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Nike, Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, American Airlines, AT&T, Microjet, Lockhart Technologies, Inc., TWA, Eddie Bauer, Wilson Sporting Goods, Best Western Hotels, K-Mart, McDonald’s, Nordstrom “Prison Blues” jeans line, Imperial Palace Hotel/Casino, C.M.T. Blues, Allstate, Shearson Lehman, Parke-Davis, Mecca, Lee Jeans, Dell Computers, Planet Hollywood, J.C. Penney, Target, Burger King, New York, New York Hotel/Casino, “No Fear” Clothing Line, Konica, Merrill Lynch, Louisiana Pacific, Upjohn, Seattle Cotton Works, Omega Pacific, Wal-Mart, JanSport, Elliot Bay, A & I Manufacturing, Nyman Marine, Redwood Outdoors, United Van Lines, Kaioti Gear, Union Bay, Lockhart Technologies and U.S. West. All in the slave market, all using slave labor. (Democratic Underground, 2007) Way to go Joe, slave-hunting for the rich and famous.
It gets worse, this is not the first crime bill that Joe has written, he has been pro-slavery for a while. One of his first attempts was in 1991 under a piece of legislation entitled, “Biden-Thurmond Violent Crime Control Act of 1991.” Yes, that Thurmond, Strom Thurmond. (Thurmond-Biden, 1991) To boot, the guy refused to admit the harm of the 1994 crime bill until he got kicked in the rump by Harris at the first debate and started dropping in the polls. Then, lo and behold he had some policies that would reverse some parts of the bill. (Glueck, 2019)
In case you are not aware, I am a statistician, next semester I will graduate from the University of Idaho’s distance study program with a Master’s degree in Statistical Science. I offer this up only to say that I understand polling and its ramifications. In light of the facts that I have enumerated above, it is inconceivable to me that Biden should be enjoying such a wide margin of support in the Black community. This is a community whom, he contended a couple of nights ago in the ABC Presidential Debate, needed social workers to come in to teach them how to raise their kids and give them a record player. (Saul, 2019) You can’t make this shit up. What the heck does a social worker, a record player, and the president of Venezuela have to do with 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow?
As you may remember, like any good bigot, when Biden was called out on his intolerant views he responded, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Well Joe, I do not know if you have such bones or not, but the fact of the matter is that one does not have to go that deep to find your particular racism, since you most times wear it on your thin skin (not to mention how often it comes pouring out of your buffoonish mouth). That said, please, o’ please Black people tell me why? Why? This won’t bring back President Obama or the Obama years. This guy is not even an Obama-ist anyway damned way, he is a dyed in the wool Clinton-ite, a moderate conservative parading as a progressive/liberal. A moderate conservative who President Obama chose out of political expedience alone. Go back and check out some of the things that Biden said about Obama during the 2008 primary while he was still running for president. Remember, President Obama intentionally picked a team of rivals, people whose thoughts were other than his own, so that he would know the positions of the naysayers. This guy is not a friend, and I ask you, what benefit would it be for us to put another slaver at the helm? How can one, in good conscience, complain about “Agent Orange” (Trump), but support Joe Biden? What an odd hypocrisy.
Works Cited
Biden, J. (2003, July 1). Joseph Biden eulogy for James Strom Thurmond. Retrieved from American Rhetoric: Online Speech Bank: www,americanrhetoric.com
Caldwell, P. (2015, August 7). Before He Was America’s Wacky Uncle, Joe Biden Was a Tough-on-Crime Hardliner. Mother Jones.
Democratic Underground. (2007, November 7). Shadows On High: Is Old Glory Made In America’s Prisons? Retrieved September 7, 2011, from Democratic Underground.com: http://www.deomocraticunderground.com
Glueck, K. (2019, July 23). Biden, Scrutinized for Crime Bill, Unveils Plan to Reduce Mass Incarceration . Retrieved from The New York Times: www.nytimes.com
Peffley, M., & Hurwitz, J. (2007). Persuasion and Resistance: Race and the Death Penalty in America. American Journal of Political Science, 996-1012.
Saul, S. (2019, September 12). Biden was asked about segregation: his answer included a record player. Retrieved from New York Times: www.nytimes.com
Terkel, A. (2019, September 12). Asked About Slavery, Joe Biden Talked About Poor Schools And Record Players. Retrieved from HuffPost: www.huffpost.com
Thurmond-Biden. (1991, July 11). Biden-Thurmond Violent Crime Control Act of 1991. Retrieved from govtrack: www.govtrack.us/congress/bills