Biden’s 1970s Comments Decrying Desegregation Busing Resurfaced By Washington Post
Potential 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden passionately fought racial integration by bussing in the 1970s, per comments he made about the Deleware school system resurfaced by the Washington Post.
Biden said in a 1975 interview with a local newspaper that he opposed the concept of reparations, as it pertained to bussing — the act of sending white children to predominately black schools and black children to white schools:
“I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.”
Segregation was deemed unconstitutional in 1954, but the lasting impact of slavery meant proactively fighting the racial inequality it created by integrating the same institutions that were divided for so long, but Biden considered the practice to be “racist.”
“We’ve lost our bearings since the 1954 Brown vs. School Board desegregation case,” Biden said. “To ‘desegregate’ is different than to ‘integrate.’ … I am philosophically opposed to quota systems. They ensure mediocrity.”
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with,” he continued. “What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
Biden accused the legal system of going “overboard” — referencing a Delaware court decision to desegregate Wilmington schools — while trying “to remedy unlawful segregation.”
“It is one thing to say that you cannot keep a black man from using this bathroom, and something quite different to say that one out of every five people who use this bathroom must be black,” he added at the time.
Biden also called bussing an “asinine concept” and called for a” constitutional amendment” to ban the policy. Biden did note the bad PR he could receive for his harsh stance against bussing since segregationists like Alabama Governor George Wallace supported the same things.
Biden went on to state that the “real problem with busing [is] you take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school.”
“You’re going to fill them with hatred,” the Democratic lawmaker said of white families.
As for the black families, he said sending an African-American “back to the ghetto” after attending a white school during the day will encourage racial hatred.
“How can he be encouraged to love his white brothers?” Biden said, who was elected to his Senate term a few years before making these comments. “He doesn’t need a look at ‘the other side,’ he needs the chance to get out of the ghetto permanently.”
Biden’s past views on race, which he claims have since evolved, have continually dogged him as his name floats around the 2020 election discussion.
