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Coming “Clean”: Joe Biden, Barack Obama and America’s Collective Racial Unconscious
For the record, I have no idea what Joe Biden was trying to say when he called Barack Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
The craziest — and maybe most revealing — aspect of Biden’s bumbling kickoff to his presidential campaign is that I’m not sure Biden knows either. He clearly had no answer when reporters pressed him throughout the day.
Barack Obama and former presidential candidates Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton took varying degrees of offense, but they also seemed confused.
The problem, it seems to me, is that white people still don’t know how to talk about race — and both white and black audiences are stuck trying to interpret their awkwardness.
Well, there’s a simple answer: context. When I discussed the racial implications of Obama along with Super Bowl coaches Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy a few days ago — using the conversation between Debra Dickerson and Gary Kamiya of Salon as inspiration — I made sure I prefaced and framed my remarks with plenty of historical and social perspective.
Yes, we need to talk about stereotypes — and about how clearly these black men are subverting them — but we need to do so with the awareness that those stereotypes are not a reality but a racist construction centuries in the making.
If Obama is exceptional — as Biden implies — he’s only exceptional because it’s one of the first times the media — and, to some extent, the broader white American public — has allowed itself to see what has been there all along.
Posted at 6:02 AM | Permalink | | 
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Biden clearly has a bizarre misunderstanding of his own remarks. According to the article, he spent all day apologizing to Obama, and pointing out that Obama didn’t take offense. Biden doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not Barack Obama he was insulting. It was the African American community. He shouldn’t be apologizing to the one guy he was complimenting… he should be apologizing to all the articulate, bright, clean citizens at whose expense he was making that compliment.
In that sense, Obama seems to have a much better grasp of the situation. At least he makes the connection to the people upon whom Biden’s remarks reflected negatively.
Posted by Jesse on February 1st, 2007 at 10:43 am
It seems pretty clear to me that by ‘mainstream’, Biden meant ‘electable in a Presidential context’.
And guess what? He is. Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton were never electable, they were not mainstream but rather outsiders to the presidential process. Whether that was their fault, the media’s, or the fault of the American public is not the issue - for whatever reason, they were not mainstream, in the sense of being real challengers for the position of POTUS. Obama is.
Posted by Angel on February 1st, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I presume he attempted a mid-sentence self-intervention/edit of the word “shaven”.
How sweet (and forfilling) it is to witness the real-time ingestion of a half-baked serving of one’s own ill chosen words. Yum.
But there’s no real nutrition in it, so snack on it for the moment, then relegate it to the dustbin of useless political junkfood history.
Posted by michael allen on February 1st, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I presume he attempted a mid-sentence self-intervention/edit of the word “shaven”.
How sweet (and forfilling) it is to witness the real-time ingestion of a half-baked serving of one’s own ill chosen words. Yum.
But there’s no real nutrition in it, so snack on it for the moment, then relegate it to the dustbin of useless political junkfood history.
Posted by michael allen on February 1st, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Spot on! Excellent post.
R.
Posted by Jersey Guy on February 2nd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
I don’t believe that Biden meant anything derogatory or racist, regarding Barack Obama. He might have meant that Barack Obama isn’t ‘tainted’ by association with persons or groups of questionable ethical status.
Posted by Amy on March 5th, 2007 at 10:00 am