Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said people who “don’t think of themselves as racists have kind of had the mask pulled off.” | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Joe Biden says he, like many white people, was wrong about racism in America.
“I thought we had made enormous progress when we finally elected an African American president,” he told voters in a livestreamed “Young Americans Town Hall” last week. “I thought you could defeat hate, you could kill hate. But the point is, you can’t.”
Days earlier Biden said he thinks others are experiencing a similar awakening to their own willful naiveté. “Ordinary folks who don’t think of themselves as having a prejudiced bone in their body, don’t think of themselves as racists,” Biden said, “have kind of had the mask pulled off.”
The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer — and the viral video of the agonizing 8 minutes and 46 seconds with the officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck — has prompted a reckoning with racism for not only Biden, but for a wide swath of white America, according to polls conducted since Floyd’s death and anecdotal evidence from around the country.
Every state, including ones with overwhelmingly white populations like Utah and West Virginia, has seen multiple protests the past two weeks. Books like “White Fragility” and “How to be an Antiracist” have shot to the top of Amazon and The New York Times’ bestseller lists. Some African Americans have said they’ve been overwhelmed by the number of white friends checking in, with some sending cash.
Corporations across America, from Amazon to snack-food makers, are declaring “Black Lives Matter,” something even Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley flinched at saying in 2016 when he added that “white lives matter. All Lives Matter.” News Corp’s Lachlan Murdoch emailed Fox News employees last week to say it’s “essential that we grieve with the Floyd family, closely listen to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that black lives matter.”
Many white Americans, particularly those with college educations, no longer believe that Jim Crow-like conditions are a shameful relic left behind in the 1960’s or that instances of police violence against African Americans are isolated, the result of rogue bad actors. Those swiftly changing attitudes could reshape the political landscape heading into November, especially as Biden and President Donald Trump diverge in their responses to the tumult.
Trump has stuck with his brand of white identity politics that won him the White House. While he has condemned the killing of Floyd, he has retweeted people saying “Floyd was not a good person” and was a “symbol of a broken culture in black America today.” As part of a larger promise to restore “law and order,” the president has focused attention on looters and “thugs” that have devastated some businesses during the unrest. And as many Americans are protesting police violence, Trump and his campaign have resumed attacks on NFL players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, tweeting: “There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag — NO KNEELING!”
In contrast, Biden has deployed a sort of white identity politics for the people whose consciences have been shaken — the woke or, perhaps, woke-curious. It is part of a larger bet since the beginning of his campaign that the country is recoiling at Trump’s incendiary appeals and that the traditional “law and order” playbook won’t work in 2020. While Biden has denounced rioting, he has focused more on police reforms and pledged “an era of action to reverse systemic racism.”
