Having maxed out on insanity before running out of week, I’m turning to Paul Butler’s op-ed celebrating President Biden’s initial moves on racial justice. The U.S. has gone from the first Black president to the “the first white president” to the first “woke” president, Butler writes:
No question, it took Joe Biden a while to get there. For most of his long career, as Vice President Harris once noted, Biden has not been a leader on race; on occasion, his political ambition veered him off course, as when he opposed busing to achieve school integration. Biden used to brag about his role in passing the 1994 crime bill, which now is understood as a leading cause of mass incarceration.
But if the convert sings loudest in the choir, the new woke Biden could outperform Patti LaBelle. During the Democratic primaries, Black voters rescued Biden’s candidacy. He and they understand it is payback time.
In his victory speech, Biden told African American voters, “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” Had Obama uttered those words, the likes of then-Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) might have called for his impeachment.
Moving beyond Biden’s inauguration-speech rhetoric, Butler believes Biden set off in the right direction:
Biden is off to a credible start. If an HBO series hadn’t already taken the title, the administration’s first week could have been called “The Undoing.” Biden rolled back some of the previous administration’s most egregious policies on race. He abolished Trump’s 1776 Commission, which encouraged schools to teach U.S. history discounting the role of white supremacy. Biden ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to beef up its anti-discrimination enforcement, which lagged under the Trump administration. Obama had banned private federal prisons, and Trump reinstituted them; now Biden has reimposed the ban.
These are necessary steps but modest in light of Biden’s pledge to eradicate systemic discrimination, the bias built into institutions and legal systems.
For example, the ban on private prisons does not immediately close a single prison. It says that when contracts with private prisons expire, they should not be renewed. The ban does not address the larger issue of mass incarceration, since only about 10 percent of all inmates are housed in federal prisons.
Last week, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) tweeted that if Biden wants to thank Black women for his election, he should cancel all student debt, because Black women carry more such debt than any other group. That is just one example of the kind of bold move that many civil rights advocates are not just hoping for but also expecting, based on Biden’s rhetoric.
So, for seekers of racial justice, Biden had a decent start. But people of color cannot afford a long honeymoon with the new administration. Biden has said, “We need to make equity and justice part of what we do every day — today, tomorrow and every day.” People of color must ask every week for the next four years: “What have you done for us lately?”
They had better be able to point to a lot of progress in just the next two years. Because Biden and Democrats will be asking people of color, particularly women, what they can do to help keep control of Congress for the last two years of the Biden administration.