"I Want To Be Black!" - The Sad Whiteness Of Joe Biden

Bill Clinton said he was the first black president, and he indeed came as close as they come.  He loved fried chicken, collard greens, and the blues.  He loved hanging out with black men on the stoop, sharing stories about poontang and moonshine.  He liked the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the aging coterie of Martin Luther King.  He said that he felt for the plight of black people – it was a personal, emotional thing with him, not just a political one.  Even more than LBJ who did more for the black community than any president since Lincoln, Bill Clinton’s empathy was heartfelt.  He was moved to tears over a poor black child, fist-clenching angry over reports of lingering Jim Crow and continuing denial of black rights.  

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Black people loved him, apparently.  They loved his warmth and good-natured camaraderie, and felt that his friendship was above and beyond ‘the black vote’.  He was a friend to the black man, and they would never forget it at the polls. The fact that he drew the line at black women – his preferences were uniquely white – gave some blacks pause.  If he were really one of them, he would be courting their women.  Ordinarily black men were angered at white sexual trolling – for that was what it was, sexual adventurism which never amounted to anything; and worse, white men never settled for anything less than the high-toned, sassy, and best black women, emptying the gene pool of the best.  Yet, they forgave Clinton for his white women.  He meant well, but how could an Arkansas cracker ever get above high-gloss nail polish, tight skirts, and cheap beauty parlor hair?  He was as black as a white man could get, but still as white as an Easter lily.

Joe Biden in his private moments wanted to be even more black than Bill Clinton.  He wanted to truly breach the divide between black and white, make the racial promise of America reside in him.  He wanted to walk, talk, and act as black as the men whom he secretly admired.  He was no Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas fan.  They had been laundered, bleached, and whitened beyond recognition.  If you shut your eyes when they spoke, you would swear that they were white.  No, he wanted the true black experience, but didn’t know how to get it.

Of course, growing up in Delaware, he had no chance to associate with black people let alone become like them.   The 40s and 50sin Wilmington were still socially segregated; so he played ball with white classmates in white neighborhoods, went to a white church and white schools, and  never saw a black person except through the windows of the crosstown bus.  Bill Clinton’s South was a very different place.  

While assumptions of racial inferiority persisted in the South – the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction legislatures packed with illiterate former slaves, and the autocracy of the Freedmen’s Bureaus lingered – it was far more integrated than the North ever was or could be.  In small towns of Mississippi white, middle class neighborhoods abut poor black ones; whites and blacks crisscross, greet each other, and are cordial; nothing like neo-apartheid Washington DC where east of the Park is all black, and west of it all white.  The races in Washington only meet in the federal government or at the DMV.

Bill Clinton came by his racial tolerance naturally.  It wasn’t necessarily that he thought blacks were equal to whites – such distinctions were never in play in the quiet corners of the South were both races were in their place – but that he knew that their overwhelming demographic proportions in the Southern states could mean victory for him.  To be fair, Clinton was a naturally, inherently social person.  He was always comfortable in a crowd, whatever its complexion.  It was just as easy for him to be with black people as white. Joe Biden, for all his Congressional gregariousness never had the personal intimacy of Clinton.  His smile was always fixed in place signaling bonhomie and welcome but little more; but such empty political camaraderie got him perennially reelected in his small state where everyone knew him.

The black ‘thing’ was therefore new to Biden.  For most of his political career he had supported liberal causes and civil rights was one of them; but unlike Clinton, he could never think black, nor even imagine any part of the black experience.  Despite his liberal political agenda and his longstanding progressive commitment to the black cause, he always felt removed – not exactly a poseur or dilettante, but far from the action.

Being Obama’s Vice President didn’t help at all.  To Obama’s credit he never went black, talked black, or acted ghetto.   He was half-white, educated in traditionally white schools, and was part of the Eastern Establishment elite.  The white electorate celebrated his presidential victory, hoping that his accession signaled the beginning of the end of racial tensions in America.  Of course they were as ignorant as Joe Biden about black inner city communities where persistent dysfunction, culture of entitlement, and lack of personal responsibility increased their segregation.   When blackness exploded in the form of radical, organized, angry demonstrations orchestrated by Black Lives Matter, these former moderate Obama supporters were surprised, frustrated, and not a little angry.  What did these people want?  They got a black president.

So, by the time Joe Biden sat in the White House, racial tensions and hostilities were at their height; and he, a good, lifelong progressive, wanted to put things right.  But he was not Clinton or Johnson, Southerners with an instinctive sense of race; and as much as he kept a political silence about the destructive rampages after the deaths of black men during police arrests, he was nonplussed.  As a child of the temperate, homogeneous, righteous, white 50s, for all his political solidarity, he couldn’t understand the chaos, nor the inner city culture from which it came.

No one who followed Biden’s career in political office every suggested that he was a leader.  He was at best a man of compromise, moderation, and good will – a dutiful follower, a responsible advocate for his constituents and little more.  The Vice Presidency was the perfect office for him.  It required nothing.

Unfortunately this sense of dutiful following and generous compromise coincided with diminished mental acuity.  He couldn’t quite frame an issue the way he used to, got confused when asked to sort through variables and proximate causes; and turned his affairs over to his Vice President.  Moreover she, being black herself, would certainly be able to calm the racial waters and by example show the young men of the inner city that they too could rise to power and prominence.  Of course she was just about as black as Condoleezza Rice, Obama, or Colin Powell,  and so was far removed from the inner city; but Biden was proud that he had selected her as a running mate and immediately put her out front with the black community.

Still, this didn’t do the trick for the President.  Thanks to the radical liberal leanings of the media and especially Hollywood, there were black actors, black-themed dramas, and racially charged scenarios far out of proportion to the small percentage of blacks in the population.  Any foreign visitor watching American prime time television would think that black people were at least fifty percent of the population, not the bit more than ten that they were.  The more Biden watched, the more he wanted to be black – authentically black, ghetto black, rap, pimped, bejeweled black.  How sad and sorry was his white-bread, prayerful, duty-bound, responsible life.  White privilege? Hell, no.  Whiteness was an unhappy lot.

Yet, now almost 80, he knew that he would always be just a black wannabee.  No hot, black women in his bed, no malt liquor on the stoop on hot summer nights, no spinners, pimped out rides, and fur coats.  It was a sorry consignment.  Worse, the whole White House thing looked like a charade.  He had plugged racial types into his Cabinet like pegs, entertained young black Congressional radicals with a smile, talked up Black Lives Matter, condemned systemic racism and championed Critical Race Theory; but felt he was a stick figure propped up in the middle of a bad soap opera.

In other words, he had been duped just like millions of other white liberals who were conned into thinking that whiteness was a bad thing, blackness was a higher good, and that radical racial reform – expunging and erasing America’s past; lionizing minority culture and dumping Socrates, the Sun King, and the Renaissance; dismantling capitalism and embracing a New Social World Order – was America’s future.

“Turn that music off!”, shouted Jill to Joe, snapping his fingers to Lil Uzi Vert. “I’m trying to sleep”.