Joe Biden called a black man a “negro” last week. It was clear as day. He called the late Satchel Paige a “negro.” It’s not the n-word, but you can’t call black people that anymore, Joe. Yes, Paige was a pitcher in the Negro league, but that’s not what Joe said. And the fact that we have explainer pieces on how it’s not really a big deal that Joe said this just shows you that the liberal media knows this was a trip-up. If a Republican had said this, you know what the reaction from the liberal media would be. All the race-baiters on CNN and MSNBC would be featured several times a day for the next 10 days delivering unhinged lectures about how the GOP and white folks are racist. Leave it to The Washington Post to waste a lot of time on this, even though they admit it’s a ‘pseudo-debate.’
Let’s go to what Biden said:
“I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro — at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues, went on to become a great pitcher in the pros, in the — Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.”
Joe Biden referring to Satchel Paige as "the great negro at the time" sounds just as terrible as you'd think it would. pic.twitter.com/sZiO4ICHlJ
— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) November 11, 2021
And the predictable interference (via WaPo):
There is a sense among many conservatives that the political left is constantly attacking them as racist. The reasons for this are myriad and complicated, rooted to some extent in the overlap of race and partisanship (most Black Americans are Democrats) and in a sense that reevaluations of America’s history through the lens of race are implicitly (or explicitly) about criticizing White Americans. Polling has repeatedly shown that Republicans and, in particular, Trump supporters perceive White Americans as subject to discrimination at rates equal to or larger than minority groups. Many on the right believe that the left sees accusations of racism as a political trump card and deploys them to that effect.
At the same time, there’s a popular narrative on the right that insists that Democrats are the party of racism. After all, Abraham Lincoln was the Republican president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Southern Democrats were the driving force behind segregation and, often, anti-Black violence 100 years ago. That there was a dramatic and public move by segregationists away from Democrats during the civil rights era is generally ignored; the more useful story casts the political left as the then-and-now purveyors of racial discrimination.
[…]
To a large extent, this is also a function of the enthusiastic deployment of whataboutism in current political discussions. During Donald Trump’s presidency, a common refrain in his defense was to contrast his actions and statements with cherry-picked examples of others: What about what Barack Obama did?? So, as the presidential contest between Biden and Trump unfolded last year in front of the backdrop of racial tensions, Trump allies and Biden opponents worked to define Biden as a racist. It could be useful to mute criticisms of Trump, sure — What about what Biden said?? — but it also helped reinforce the idea that Democrats were hypocrites on race who used claims of racism opportunistically.
[…]
This is why the “Negro” allegation gained traction. The hashtag #RacistJoeBiden was trending on Twitter by early Friday afternoon. Some commenters on social media described Biden’s speech as having used the “n-word,” suggesting that a term once commonly used to refer to Black Americans — a descriptor that was in use in the Census Bureau’s racial categories as recently as 2010 — was equivalent to a historically racist slur. By pretending that Biden was calling Paige a “Negro,” though, they could pretend that Biden was revealing a secret bias against Black Americans, both for him and his party.
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No, guy—conservatives are being attacked for being racist for merely not voting for Democrats. Meanwhile, the liberal media seems to forget that the Democratic governor of Virginia wore blackface. Also, there’s a dude in Ku Klux Klan garb in his medical school yearbook. Funny how that’s just swept under the rug. And the whataboutism that you lament about was caused…by you. It’s okay for Democrats to do it, not the Right. We’re done playing by those rules. Also, the Democrats are the party of the Klan and poll taxes for black Americans during Reconstruction. The core of the piece is that the liberal media needs to defend Joe Biden. It’s their job. They can’t defend him on the economy. He’s failing. They can’t defend him on rising inflation. They didn’t defend him for his Afghanistan fiasco—there was nothing they could spin. And they can’t defend him on COVID. Joe was the man who was going to shut it down, remember? So, with nothing to defend this guy, I guess his gaffes are it.
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