The one thing I don't understand is how Biden, who has a long career full of making racist statements, yet he gets a free pass because he has a D beside his name. I don't get it. I really don't.
How is it you think he gets a free pass. Maybe you missed that during the primaries Kamala Harris took Biden to task for having worked with racist southern Senators while opposing school busing. From a piece in
Teen Vogue, no less, during the campaign:
“It was hurtful to hear you [Biden] talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and careers on the segregation of race in this country,” Harris continued. “And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing.”
Biden doesn't get a pass. He still slips and gets called out and then he gets some credit for continuing to make an effort to reduce effects of white supremacist thinking in the USA --e.g., in the housing sector, hammering on enforcement of laws against redlining and discriminatory housing appraisals-- which is more than one can say for Trump, who invariably just denies that he's racist.
Both men grew up in times that were far different to where we are now. Trump is still mired in the views he acquired then, and Biden has made an effort to change things for the better.
The two of them are too old to serve again if you ask me, and whatever they learned (and whoever they learned it from) about racial matters in the USA was from a time before the 1950s and 60s when this country was finally starting to address human rights acknowledgment with court cases and additional laws to protect those rights.
No one should get a free pass and it's not clear to me anyone has gotten one, at least through the lens of today's reviews of their earlier behavior. You can spend less than 10 seconds with a search engine and any conservative media outlet can be seen as able to provide you a list of every racist remark Joe Biden is ever known to have made. No one bothers to do that with Trump because it would take too long just to list the court cases he has had to face over discrimination against minorities in the NYC housing market.
But, the politicians who made efforts to change have gotten recognition for those efforts. People like LBJ and Robert Byrd and yes Joe Biden have all made contributions to American progress in human rights after having track records that clearly evinced overt racism in the past.
For example, it was blood, sweat and tears (and yeah, threats, and horsetrading) that got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 across the finish line. In the thick of the lawmaking effort was LBJ, warts and all. He was a product of his era and yet he knew what the right thing to do was, and practically moved heaven and earth amongst the southern Senators to make it happen. And yet the N-word existed in his own lexicon.
Donald Trump in contrast has invariably denied he's a racist and then does stuff lke suggest that some congresswomen of color whose politics he doesn't care for should go back "where they came from" even if where they came from is, uh.... the Bronx?! Oh, and call some African countries sh^tholes. His own outstanding contribution to human rights has been to appoint ultraconservative SCOTUS justices willing to roll back voting rights.
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