The Biden problem for Democrats

Is Biden.  His latest gaffe is one in a long line of statements that lends credibility to the growing belief that Democrats take black Americans for granted.  Worse, it could make people wonder if Democrats as much (if not more) than anyone have truly racist attitudes toward the black community. 

Biden's statements that embrace sweeping stereotypes of the black community have been unpacked before.  We needn't rehash those.  In fact, the only thing shocking about his latest statement regarding the supposed lack of diversity within the black community is that it isn't really shocking.  Not to anyone who has watched Biden over the years. 

In the 1960s, after failing to stop the Civil Rights movement, the Democratic party adopted a new strategy.  The WASP strategy.  That is, take those old attitudes about black America and replace them with 'WASP' (that's White Anglo Saxon Protestant) America.  I remember well sitting in fourth grade social studies and learning about those dark days in American history when our country was dominated by those rascally WASPs. That would have been around 1976/1977.  So already, in barely a decade, we had adopted the idea of who it is Americans should really despise.  And it was a broad enough umbrella that all types of Americans could fit under the 'oppressed by WASPs' label (I'm looking at you Catholics).

Meanwhile, almost overnight the entire black community jumped on board the Democrat bandwagon.  By the end of the 1970s, the black community could be counted on to almost always support the Democrats.  When I was majoring in Political Science in 1986, it was so flagrant that a Democratic candidate whose campaign I was working with quipped that if the Democrats nominated Hitler, 90% of blacks would refuse to vote, since they would never vote for Hitler.  That is, no matter what, they still wouldn't vote for a GOP candidate.  And that was about two decades after the Democratic Party's failed attempts to stop the Civil Rights movement.

Nonetheless, in recent years some black Americans have begun to wonder just what their investment in total fealty to the Democratic Party has yielded.  They've noticed that most of these horrible cases of cops killing unarmed blacks happen in Democratic regions.  They've noticed that the ongoing squalor, poverty, drugs, crime and dependency typically exists within cities that have been held by Democrats for generations.  They've noticed, like some religious conservatives noticed about establishment Republicans, that there is a lot of talk about what the  Democrats will do for blacks, usually around election time, but years later little has changed.  And worse, they've begun to wonder if the Democrats are just taking them for granted. 

That's why Biden's continued 'you see one black, you've seen them all' flubs are so devastating.  Clearly there is something in the back of Biden's mind that he can't help but let slip.  It's not hard to imagine that if he was a Republican, the universal consensus would be that these statements prove his racism, and his taking the black community for granted.  He can only continue to clarify what he consistently says for so long before even those who are most passionately sympathetic to his campaign begin to wonder.   And worse, it could start getting people to begin wondering about not just Biden, but about Democrats in general, and all those good, white liberals who insist they're the brave heroes rushing in to save the hapless black Americans from their real enemies over there.