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I have started and stopped this essay dozens of times because I am having a very difficult time articulating my problem with Joe Biden.
A couple of weekends ago, I was in Brooklyn visiting my grandmother, listening to her life stories of Jim Crow Mississippi and wartime New York City, and kicking myself for not taping them or writing them down, when the news flashed across the bottom of the television screen on CBS at about one in the morning Eastern time: Sen. Barack Obama had picked Joe Biden as his running mate.
Two thoughts immediately came to mind. The first was my memory of Biden presiding over Senate Judiciary Committee hearings while hair plugs sprouted from his head like a Chia Pet. The second was his January comment about Obama.
In a world of 24-hour news cycles, January is a long time ago. So let me refresh your recollection. Journalists had asked (Presidential candidate) Biden to size up his Democratic rivals. When he got to Obama, he said, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
This One Hurts the Most
I have few semantic pet peeves, and Biden’s comment grated on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. He had used the one word that I never hear objectively: articulate.
That word has been aimed at me more times than I can count. Each use hits me unerringly, like a heat-seeking missile. I’ll give you an example. I meet a white person for the first time at a job interview or a cocktail party. After talking to me for a few minutes about my qualifications or current events, the person exclaims, “Oh, you’re so articulate!” When I hear that phrase, it’s a sure sign that I’m not going to get that job, impress that person or continue a productive conversation. Anyone who is bowled over when you can speak your native language isn’t going to think you're very good at other things.
As any person who has ever spent time with me knows — there is nothing that will get me riled up faster than hearing a black person referred to as articulate. The implicit assumption being, of course, that it’s quite unexpected that we’re, well — so well-spoken. Funny thing is, I’ve only heard the word in reference to us black folks.
Everybody but Me
Oh, Biden apologized. Obama got over it. Michelle got over it. But I couldn’t get over it. Is one comment enough to make me with withhold my vote in November?
So, I put my thoughts about Joe Biden, the soft bigotry of low expectations, and this essay aside, until I got a call from the library. My prescient request for, Joe Biden’s 2007, (“I’m gonna run for President, so I have to write a memoir cum policy primer”), Promises to Keep was waiting for me at the public library. Every morning for the past two weeks while eating my bacon and eggs, I’ve read a chapter in Joe Biden’s book. I become more uncomfortable with him as every chapter passes.
Like John McCain and other politicians’ stories, it starts out with a compelling personal narrative. Irish-Catholic child in predominantly Protestant country overcomes Catholic bias and debilitating stutter to graduate prep school and college and law school. Then the second youngest U.S. Senator ever elected loses his beloved wife and infant daughter in a drunk driving accident. He grieves, but soldiers on, putting only his family before his love of country and public service.
Is He Kidding?
And let me tell you, whoever wrote the book was funny. I don’t know whose sharp-tongued mother I like best, his or Newt Gringrich’s. Nevertheless, the Biden family stories are humorous and predictably heartwarming. He writes himself as a very Kennedyesque figure. Everyone who touches Joe Biden knows this man is destined for great things.
When Biden starts to talk about policy issues, however, I cringe. He repeatedly falls into the same coded language that is at the heart, the genesis, of his comment back in January.
In a chapter about busing to force public school desegregation (this was the 1970s), he refers to black neighborhoods as tough, but white neighborhoods as blue collar, working class, or hard working middle class. They work! They have class! We’re tough. He claims to be a supporter of civil rights, but sees it as our (as in black people’s) issue – not his, or that of his other (hard-working, remember?) constituents.
Pretty Predictable
Oh, he has the right coming-of-age stories. Even though he lived in predominantly all-white neighborhoods and attended predominantly all-white schools, where most of his friends and neighbors never talked to black people, he reached across the racial divide in the early 1960s, working as a lifeguard at an inner-city neighborhood pool. It’s like a bad sitcom. You can almost see the sepia-toned montage of moving images unfold in your mind’s eye.
He gets into a rumble with the “gangs” of the neighborhood, but they end up friends for the rest of the summer. He’s the only white guy playing pick- up basketball on the all-black team, a source of fascination for everyone. The black kids at the pool are enchanted with his hair, his looks, his Bass Weejuns. When the black kids come to his neighborhood to visit, they get the hell beat out of them. Add a little background music, and you have a good half hour of television or the opening of a campaign video.
The Biden Problem
Throw in Biden’s opinions about crime – we can address the underlying issues of poverty and unemployment as soon as we lock up those criminals – and I have the essence of what bothers me about Joe Biden. He doesn’t get it.
He sees himself as transcending race – but mires himself in the coded language of the American racial divide. He sees himself as a problem solver despite making little progress in his 36 years in the United States Senate. He is the very definition of “politics as usual.” My problem with Joe Biden is that he doesn’t represent change I can believe in.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, "Law School Supports Drug Use"—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. She's a reformed lawyer, and full time novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course.This will mark the debut of our newest, and perhaps most charismatic, weekly essayist. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
