Biden and Race

Jan 31, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Last August, during the Republican National Convention, now former United States Vice President, Mike Pence made what would have seemed to be an unconscious gaffe, the sort of wording that is the result of lazy speechwriting. Pence said:
“The American people know we do not have to choose between supporting law enforcement and standing with our African-American neighbors to improve the quality of their lives, education, jobs and safety. And from the first days of this administration, we’ve done both, and we will keep supporting law enforcement and keep supporting our African-American and minority communities across this land for four more years. Now Joe Biden says that America is systemically racist…”
Pence, like speaker after speaker at the convention – mostly White Americans – had sought to project the message that, against the spreading Black Lives Matter protest and an increasingly contentious conversation on racial inequality in America, there really was no racial problem. Talk show hosts and commentators immediately picked up however on the clear dichotomy that seemed the gaffe in Pence’ speech, that distinguishing between the implicitly legitimate “American people” with whom Pence identified and their “African-American neighbors” who enjoyed proximity to the Americans and technically shared part of the label of American, but who were clearly distinct from the true citizens of America.
It was not a mistake however. It was a theme that Pence would repeatedly return to, for example in a town hall meeting later in August, and via retweeting the core motif from his official page in September, continuously reinforcing the concept of two Americas, the core and implicitly White America striving to provide a good life to a subset of effectively resident aliens. Pence was the more passive-aggressive of what was the rabidly racist President of Donald Trump, a man who rode to power on falsely interrogating the legitimacy of the citizenship of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, and with the open support of the Klu Klux Klan.
Joe Biden, his successor, comes to power at the most critical time in 50 years when it comes to frontally tackling the issue of race in America. He himself has entered the Presidency bracketed by two racially historical figures – he served as Vice President for eight years under the historical first African-American President of America, Obama, and he serves as President over the historical first African/Indian-American Vice President, Kamala Harris. Much of his mandate will in fact be to ensure that the theme of diversification of representation and power that has marked his later political career somehow not only cleanses the racism of the Trump era, but inoculates the grand American experiment against further significant future outbreaks.
Going forward, there are of course clear issues like police violence against and mass incarceration of African-Americans, two direct and unbroken legacies of the indecent and brutal institution of slavery. But that is just the easily discernible core. The most difficult manifestation of racism to deal with in America is the sum of a multitude of micro-aggressions, still humiliating, still painful, that shows how thoroughly racism has manifested in America. While the cellphone video technology and the livestreaming capacity of the Internet has served to expose, for example, Karen culture, privileged White women harassing African-American people, situation that often escalated with those women weaponizing the law enforcement system, heavily prejudiced in their favour, against the victims of their harassment. And that is just one categorical example, while there a million others, most of which defy easy categorization. The most egregious example, taking place only last week, consisted of a cemetery in Louisiana denying a burial plot to the family of a deceased African-American policeman on the basis that its own rules, put in place fifty years ago as a response to the Civil Rights movement, designated the cemetery as a Whites only facility. In an America in which racial discrimination against the dead has survived without notice into the 21st century, Biden has a Herculean task of tackling the issue of race to benefit the living.

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Biden and Race

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