"I didn't take Senator Biden's comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate"

"African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate."

Biden's right . . . that colored kid IS articulate! :sarcasm:

(and a class act, to boot!)

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/index.html?section=cnn_latest

demanding respect (and getting it!) from the Old School!

I think one of the reasons this is resonating so much is because of Biden's seeming inability to rein in his mouth - or even to bother thinking before spewing forth endlessly on whatever topic may or may not be at hand. This is his achilles heel and the fact that he made such a faux pas on the day of his announcement makes this all the more compelling and noticeable.

cosmopolitan.

if you listen to the actual recording of the interview (someone posted it on DU), it's clear that Biden said this, in response to a question about Obama -

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American, who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”


The transcript put out by the Observer leaves out the comma, which changes Biden's meaning dramatically.

Biden accurately describes Obama as the first mainstream African-American to run for President. None of the others mentioned, (Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton) can be considered mainstream candidates; candidates with a real chance to win. He then goes on to describe Obama as articulate,bright,clean (no baggage, unlike, say Hillary) and good looking. All of this is in reference to Obama, not other African Americans, as so many on this board believe. And apparently Obama believes this now also.


Once again we are letting, abd even helping, the press take down a Democrat for something taken out of context or just plain misquoted.

Statement implies an articulate, bright, clean, nice-looking, african-american guy is extraordinary.

but I don't expect you or the others on this board (who are the majority) interested in trashing Democrats at the slightest excuse to acknowledge that.

But I'm am interested in exposing unconscious racial bias.

It saddens me to see how many DUers seem so tone-deaf to this kind of thing and, even worse, are so willing to defend it.

That is it exactly!

This was far more than a slip of the tongue, this is a pattern of "foot in mouth,"

Biden is a wind bag..

He should know better.

The entire remark was foolish.

and since it's often in the eye of the beholder, I'm sure you and the rest of the PC police here at DU will have a field day.

----------------



I'm a lot more concerned with "conscious" racial bias.

and some eyes see better than others

people always see what they want to see, and that holds true for both sides of this debate.

Psychology Today
May-June, 1998

Where bias begins: the truth about stereotypes

Annie Murphy Paul

Psychologists once believed that only bigoted people used stereotypes. Now the study of unconscious bias is revealing the unsettling truth: We all use stereotypes, all the time, without knowing it. We have met the enemy of equality, and the enemy is us.

Mahzarin Banaji doesn't fit anybody's idea of a racist. A psychology professor at Yale University, she studies stereotypes for a living. And as a woman and a member of a minority ethnic group, she has felt firsthand the sting of discrimination. Yet when she took one of her own tests of unconscious bias, "I showed very strong prejudices," she says. "It was truly a disconcerting experience." And an illuminating one. When Banaji was in graduate school in the early 1980s, theories about stereotypes were concerned only with their explicit expression: outright and unabashed racism, sexism, anti-Semitism. But in the years since, a new approach to stereotypes has shattered that simple notion. The bias Banaji and her colleagues are studying is something far more subtle, and more insidious: what's known as automatic or implicit stereotyping, which, they find, we do all the time without knowing it. Though out-and-out bigotry may be on the decline, says Banaji, "if anything, stereotyping is a bigger problem than we ever imagined."

Previously, researchers who studied stereotyping had simply asked people to record their feelings about minority groups and had used their answers as an index of their attitudes. Psychologists now understand that these conscious replies are only half the story. How progressive a person seems to be on the surface bears little or no relation to how prejudiced he or she is on an unconscious level--so that a bleeding-heart liberal might harbor just as many biases as a neo-Nazi skinhead.

As surprising as these findings are, they confirmed the hunches of many students of human behavior. "Twenty years ago, we hypothesized that there were people who said they were not prejudiced but who really did have unconscious negative stereotypes and beliefs," says psychologist Jack Dovidio, Ph.D., of Colgate University. "It was like theorizing about the existence of a virus, and then one day seeing it under a microscope."

* * *

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/is_n3_v31/ai_20526120/pg_1

If we parse it, the first element is "mainstream African-American candidate," which means that exactly. The next element, "who is articulate, clean, and nice-looking..." then means that while other candidates who were African-American in ancestry could not be described as mainstream and articulate, and nice-looking, and clean (cut or in ethical history).

This implies that past African-American candidates may have been endowed with one or more of the qualities, but not have been mainstream, clean, articulate, or nice-looking.

Still, Mr. Biden should follow my advice on race: don't mention it when praising or damning anyone. It is immaterial in looks, personality, or ethics.

Even if it was misunderstood and/or misconstrued by the press, it wandered into dangerous territory and was at the very least dumb.

I read it as T-A-C-K-Y.

Everything that comes out of a politician's mouth is fair game which is why I rarely feel sorry for the consequences they face.
It is what it is.

Biden's mouth = record short Presidential campaign.

Biden has so much "experience" and yet these kind of remarks just seem to slip off of his tongue.

Huuum --- and they say that OBAMA does not have "experience."

Part of the problem with our current resident is that he "shoots fromthe hip" and just says anything that pops into his little mind.

My visual is seeing Biden talking to the Muslim leaders --- he already gave them his 7/11 views.

http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=463858485

I'm more concerned with what I see as the deliberate misrepresentation by the NY Observer in the transcript. There is a world of difference in what Biden said if you put the comma in there. The only way a candidate can protect themselves from this sort of thing is to keep their mouthe's shut. Which may explain Hillary's strategy...

I really don't care that much about Biden - what I find worrisome is that every candidate is open to this sort of thing, no matter what he or she says. Way too many are more than willing to jump on the bandwagon of questioning a candidate because of something the media says he or she said before questioning the motivations of the media, who may be a lot more interested in creating a controversy than in reporting facts.

that's sound pretty mainstream. I guess the fact that he was Black made him not mainstream....hey? :shrug:

Besides, Jackson's skin is darker. And his nose is flatter and broader. So right there he's not as mainstream as Obama.

I will grant Biden this, though: Jackson, Chisholm, Sharpton and Moseley-Braun were not mainstream in that they were uncompromising, I think, on economic justice.

Edited to delete something I probably shouldn't have said. Obama's response today is perfect. I need to do a little more research on how consistent he is on economic justice.