Joe Biden has adopted some of the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, but notably rejected its boldest proposals. Here's why.
At a megachurch in Phoenix this week, Donald Trump regaled a crowd of mostly maskless students with a story about the moment he said he knew he would win a second term.
Biden did not endorse the controversial activist slogan, steering clear of Trump’s attacks. On June 10, he wrote anlaying out his views on police reform and stated unequivocally, “I do not support defunding police.” But the question remains: What is Biden’s role, as the Democratic nominee, as America reckons with racism?
“He’s been very clear he wouldn’t be running unless Donald Trump were president,” said Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Biden. “There is a conversation that’s going on on Twitter that they don’t care about,” one Democratic strategist observed. “They won the primary by ignoring all of that. The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional left that has taken over places like the New York Times. You can be against chokeholds and not believe in white fragility. You can be for reforming police departments and don’t necessarily have to believe that the United States is irredeemably racist.
“It's important to remember what Vice President Biden said in the last couple of months: that he intended to be a transition figure for the Democratic Party,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, the 47-year-old Democrat from Hawaii who is a favorite of progressives.
From this perspective, the fact that Biden is a relatively non-ideological politician who has continuously shifted with the political tides to remain close to the consensus view of his party might be a feature, not a bug. “Nobody expects Vice President Biden to organize a direct action,” Mitchell said. “That’s not his job.”Just as Mitchell would expect, Democratic candidates across the country are recalibrating their positions on police reform and racial justice to catch up with the public.
“Joe Biden doesn't have to be a revolutionary," said Jennifer Epps-Addison, president of the Center for Popular Democracy. "But he has to agree to actually bring folks who have been marginalized both by the Democratic and Republican Party to the table, and have a conversation about how we are going to ensure that we break down these systems of racial and economic and gender based inequity in our country.
Another flash point inside the campaign pits progressives against Biden stalwarts over the issue of legalizing marijuana, which has been hotly debated among members of the task force.
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