The other day radio and television personality
Glenn Beck made the argument that Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) cannot be called racist on the basis of this
exchange with a reporter from the New York Observer:
BIDEN: "I mean, you got the first sort of ... mainstream African American..."
REPORTER: "Yeah."
BIDEN: "... who is articulate and bright and ... and clean and a nice-looking guy..."
REPORTER: "Mmm."
BIDEN: "... I mean, that's a storybook, man."
Not surprisingly, Biden's clumsy statement brought immediate charges of racism.
Glann Beck, like most everyone else, focused on the adjectives "bright" and "clean," and then Beck made the case (quite well, actually) that Biden's entire public record must be examined. Beck compared Biden's statement to that of Trent Lott, who was hounded out of public office by the press after basically wishing Strom Thurmond a happy birthday.
And Beck would be correct, if those had been the parts of Biden's statement that reveal innate racism on Biden's part.
But they're not. The word that indicts Biden, and a large percentage of the liberal community, is "mainstream." Any honest definition of the word as applied to politics includes all those individuals who don't fall too far away from the center of a liberal-conservative political scale.
Unless, that is, the individual is an African-American. African-Americans are not allowed, in liberal circles, to be considered "mainstream" if their politics fall right of center. Liberals assert that African-Americans' political interests lie in supporting the Left (despite forty years of political three-card Monte designed to keep African-Americans down in the ghetto) and that any African-American who holds conservative views is outside the mainstream.
Telling individuals what their political views
must be on the basis of those individuals' race cannot be considered anything other than racism.
That, Mr. Beck, is why Joe Biden is a racist.