Does Joe Biden’s Segregationist Comment Separate His Motive from His Message

First, let me say it plainly and then attempt to make you feel all the pain of Joe Biden’s “segregationist” comment.

The lack of outrage from the left and others who claim to care about black-lived trauma associated with  the Black American-born experience is the most uncomfortable reminder that we are still way too close, mentally, to the racist rice paddies of the Carolinas, the tobacco farms of Virginia, and the cotton fields of Mississippi. Let us be mindful that these odysseys were linked by two common denominators: they were staffed by black slave labor and governed by white supremacy.

Segregation as a policy was a denial of the completeness of an entire race of people, screaming to us that we were besmirched and must be sequestered for the protection and pureness of whiteness. It was a dry and musty progeny of slavery. Joe Biden’s comment and the left’s silence about this shameful family tree and the fruit it bore is troubling but even more so given the current occupant of the White House.

Joe Biden’s claims of civility haunt my mind because this country’s history is filled with “civil” white men who owned my ancestors, raped my ancestors, and hung my ancestors. Call his name: George Washington. Call his name: Thomas Jefferson. Call his name: Patrick Henry (who had the audacity to famously say, “Give me liberty or give me death” while owning slaves). And, eleven more of the United States’ Founding Fathers are amongst this list of great white American men labelled civil while they owned humans. I SAID, “THEY OWNED HUMANS!”

For those who choose to stand on the side of Biden, riddle me this: if his name were Ilhan Omar where would you be? The time has come and gone for people like Tulsi Gabbard (and any others who dare to support Biden) to retreat when it comes to telling black people how they should feel about a history that ravaged our people.

I am left to wonder how this conversation would have shaken out if Joe Biden had talked about the civility of Nazis during the Holocaust. Why are we obligated to tiptoe around the horrors enacted against black people and then ordered to move on and forget them? Yet, in the same breath we are told to never forget 9/11, The Holocaust, and every other atrocity…except slavery.

Though I am not naive, I do hope the day will come when we have moved beyond the idea that blacks have no right to voice an opinion when once again our mistreatment is marginalized. Remain quiet if you must. But, do not expect me to do the same.