WATCH: Reporter Asks Joe Biden How He Would ‘Convince White Supremacists’ That Minorities Are Vital to Country
A reporter asked former Vice President Joe Biden how he could “convince white supremacists that minority groups are vital to restoring the soul of America?”
During Thursday morning’s newsmaker session at the 2020 National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) Joint Virtual Convention, Dallas Morning News Mexico border correspondent Alfredo Corchado referenced the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist massacre in El Paso, TX, in asking Biden about white supremacy.
“I’m sitting in El Paso Texas, and it’s been one year since a gunman walked into a Walmart and killed 23 people,” Corchado said. “He told police he came to kill Mexicans. This is the largest attack on Latinos in modern history. You’ve accused President Trump of bearing responsibility for the rise in hate crimes.”
He then asked Biden “How do you convince white supremacists that minority groups are vital to restoring the soul of America?”
“I don’t convince white supremacists,” Biden said without hesitating. “They’re not going to be convinced. They have to be put in jail when they do things that are inappropriate. White supremacists are not going to be convinced, but the vast vast vast majority of people are not white supremacists.”
Biden then told the familiar tale of waiting for a train in Delaware to take him to be sworn in as President Barack Obama’s VP, recalling the toll racial unrest had taken on the area 40 years earlier, and calling his children from that train station to say “Don’t tell me things can’t change.”
He talked about being inspired to run for president “because of Donald Trump’s, what he said when those folks came out of the fields in Charlottesville,” and about the opportunity he sees in the crises that have exposed racial inequities.
“We can do this, the country is ready, they know we must,” Biden said.
CBS News national correspondent Errol Barnett then interjected “I want to follow up on your point to Alfredo’s question that white supremacists can’t be convinced. You just said there that the extreme right wing folks in the country, left unattended, will grow. So shouldn’t there be some sentiment to reach out to people who hold racist views to convince them otherwise?”
“No, that’s different than the white, look, you’re talking about white supremacists,” Biden said. “I thought you were talking about the people like the kid who showed up in El Paso and gunned down all those innocent people. Okay? That’s what we’re talking about. The Ku Klux Klan and the like, the white supremacists. Those who belong to those groups. They are a minority.”
“I’m reaching out to everyone else, I’ve done it my whole career,” Biden said, and went on to add that “you can deal with those who in fact are prejudiced, a lot of prejudice out there, but not everyone’s a white supremacist like the kid who went in and gunned down those folks in El Paso. There’s a difference.”
Watch the clip above via Yahoo! News.
