Friday Morning QBs Destroy Biden’s ‘Record Player’ Response on Slavery: ‘Racist … Incoherent, and Disqualifying’

Joe DePaoloSep 13th, 2019, 11:10 am
 

A moment late in Thursday night’s debate involving former Vice President Joe Biden is coming under heavy scrutiny Friday morning.

During the final hour of Thursday’s debate, Biden was asked by moderator Linsey Davis, “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

The former vice president went on to give a lengthy, rambling reply which did not answer the question.

Look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Red lining, banks, making sure we are in a position where— look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have to make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4, and 5-year-olds go to school. School, not day care. School.

We bring social workers into homes with parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone. Make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

The remark was spotlighted by Time editor at large Anand Giridharadas, who called it a “racist, classist, incoherent, and disqualifying moment that should send him into retirement today.”

“Joe Biden’s answer on how to address the legacy of slavery was appalling — and disqualifying,” Giridharadas wrote, as part of a viral Tweetstorm. “It ended in a sermon implying that black parents don’t know how to raise their own children. This cannot go on.”

In a column for The Atlantic, writer David Graham ripped Biden over the incoherent nature of his response, along with a subsequent tangent about Venezuela which seemingly came from out of nowhere.

“Biden wasn’t just rambling — he was the angry old man demanding his rivals, and the moderators, get off his lawn,” Graham wrote. “It was a disastrous answer.”

Other observers were highly critical. Here’s a sampling:

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Joe DePaolo - Editor in Chief

Joe DePaolo is the Editor in Chief of Mediaite. Email him here: joed@mediaite.com Follow him on X: @joe_depaolo