Put Y'all Back in Chains by Horace Cooper

Author:Horace Cooper [Cooper, Horace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637587072
Publisher: Bombardier Books
Published: 2023-04-12T14:22:53+00:00

Chapter Seven

Put Y’all Back in Chains

I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.

— Joe Biden, about Barack Obama, 2007

In 2007, on the day he would officially file his Federal Election Commission paperwork to launch his presidential campaign, Joe Biden gave an infamous interview to The New York Observer in which he offered this dubious compliment to Senator Barack Obama.

While not attacking Biden, Obama explained that the remarks were “historically inaccurate” and explained that “African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.” Biden was forced to call a press conference to explain that his remarks were taken out of context.1

A few years later, he spoke at Senator Robert Byrd’s funeral, calling the West Virginia Democrat a mentor, and went so far as to claim that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.”2 Senator Byrd, a former “exalted cyclops” of the Ku Klux Klan, who had the odious distinction of being the only Senator to have voted against both blacks named to the Supreme Court at that time,3 who also managed to complain during a Fox News Sunday interview that Americans talks too much about race, and even complained that there are “white N******”.4

Enough about Robert Byrd.

Early in his career, Joe Biden was anything but a racial moderate. While it is true that two of his great-great-grandfathers were slaveowners, Joe Biden can’t be blamed for that.5 He can be blamed, however, for his use of dog whistles for his own political advantage. In Biden’s first U.S. Senate campaign against moderate Republican Senator Cale Boggs, he had ads printed in local papers that mocked Boggs, saying, “To Cale Boggs an unfair tax was the 1948 poll tax.”6 Boggs, a two-term Senator and former Delaware governor, was highly regarded as a civil rights supporter, having voted for the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned poll taxes.7 Boggs had also voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964,8 the Voting Rights Act of 1965,9 and even the confirmation of progressive Thurgood Marshall (the first black person nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court).10

Biden won.

In 1977, heading into his re-election campaign, Biden decided that opposing school desegregation was going to be his big legislative issue. However, instead of laying out practical and legal problems associated with forced busing, he preferred to racialize it, explaining that mandatory busing would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”11

In order to “save” his children from growing up in a “racial jungle,” Biden worked with open and notorious segregationists in the Senate to push his bill.12 Today, when asked about his past efforts working with these bigots, he explains, “You got to deal with what’s in front of you and what was in front of you was a bunch of racists and we had to defeat them.”13 Apparently, you defeat racists by recruiting them to join your anti-desegregation efforts.

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