Joe Biden’s White Privilege

The Democratic frontrunner is nostalgic for a world his opponents could never be a part of.

Joe Biden

Michael Brochstein/ZUMA

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On Tuesday night, former Vice President Joe Biden told a room full of wealthy New York donors about the good old days. When he first arrived in the Senate in the 1970s, Biden recalled, he joined a Democratic caucus that included staunch segregationists, such as Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi.

“He never called me boy, he always called me son,” Biden said of Eastland, before describing Talmadge as “one of the meanest guys I ever knew.”

“At least there was some civility,” he continued. “We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Biden has offered variations on this lesson many times. He eulogized segregationist Strom Thurmond at the South Carolina senator’s 2003 funeral. He wrote of his courtship of Eastland and fellow Mississippian John Stennis in his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep. At a 2017 Alabama rally in support of now-Sen. Doug Jones, Biden described his past relationship with “seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists”—including Eastland—as evidence of a collegiality that was now sorely missed. “You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them,” he said. “Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”

In the past, when Biden has gotten in trouble for statements he has made, they have tended to be categorized as “gaffes.” But when it comes to the segregationists of his early years, Biden has repeated himself so often that there should be little ambiguity about whether he is, in fact, saying what he means. His words come from the very soul of his political identity. He believes that finding common ground with the Eastlands of the world, even when you disagree on Serious Things, is what politics is all about.

His rivals are starting to notice. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, a longshot Democratic presidential candidate, landed one of the first punches against Biden. Eastland, de Blasio wrote in a Tweet on Wednesday, “thought my multiracial family should be illegal”:

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker followed up with a statement demanding Biden apologize:

There’s a dispute about whether Eastland ever actually said the words quoted in de Blasio’s tweet, but Eastland’s career was the embodiment of a white supremacy enforced through violence. He intimated that civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were faking their deaths for publicity; argued that Brown v. Board of Education—the landmark Supreme Court case outlawing school segregation—was a monstrosity; and said that interracial marriage would diminish the “purity” of the “Caucasian bloodstream” that made America great.

That Biden was able to work with Eastland speaks, perhaps, to a certain aptitude at legislative negotiations on his part. But mostly it’s a product of what “we” meant in the context of the United States Senate in 1973. Eastland called him “son” and not “boy” because Biden was white, and for that same reason, they were able to put aside their differences and work together to fight, well, the desegregation of public schools via mandatory busing. As Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said Wednesday, working civilly with Eastland was a privilege reserved for white men. 

On Wednesday, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip and the highest-ranking African American member of Congress, came to Biden’s defense:

Clyburn, a few days ahead of his marquee Fish Fry in Columbia, which Biden will attend, was being generous to the former vice president. Because what Biden was saying wasn’t just that he could work with the likes of Eastland in spite it all. He was saying that in some curious way, politics worked better back then—at a time when segregationists controlled committees and a total of zero senators were women. He was expressing a nostalgia for a world many of his fellow candidates could never be a part of. They’re not likely to let him forget it.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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