Joseph R. Biden Jr. Quotes

I disagree with the prevailing point of view of some black leaders that special treatment for blacks is acceptable.

In this room we're all here together, but there's probably a lot of different views, people sitting here thinking, I don't own any slaves, all the slaves are dead. Why am I responsible? My family were immigrants, too.

In America, many marginally competent or flatly incompetent whites are hired every day -some because their white skin suits the conscious or unconscious racial preference of their employers. The white children of alumni are often grandfathered into elite universities in what can only be seen as a residual benefit of historic white privilege.

Only when we ensure that the mistakes of our past are not the vision for our future, will we truly have achieved justice.

You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.

I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I've changed my mind. And I've publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.

To me, the failure of liberalism - the tradition I come from - was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.

Affirmative action is under attack today, not because it has failed, but because it succeeded.

Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has an obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice. Judiciously administered affirmative action programs in education and employment can be important expressions of the drive for solidarity and participation that is at the heart of true justice. Social harm calls for social relief.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

Affirmative action is the majority’s constitutional prerogative, through the use of the democratic process—and a means of taking responsibility for the community’s past wrongdoing.

The doublespeak of the American neoconservatives who conjured up the term "reverse racism" (was) to attack those who fought against White supremacy. This so-called ‘colorblind’ ideology has reversed the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and is actually commonsense among White Americans. It informs policymakers from the White House to the Supreme Court and has been used to justify the retreat from egalitarianism.

The average white person now feels that anti-white bias is a bigger problem than other forms of racial discrimination.

One of the things that will decline over time is the demand that the society or the government bring forth a particularized racial remedy based on a history of deprivation. That will be even more difficult to do in the future.

There's injustices within our system that we inherited from this time, from slavery, and until we confront our past, we're not going to be able to heal the wounds for our future.

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.

We need to dismantle the systems that were built on racism, that were built on the backs of black people.

Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument.

I'm a white male in power. In many cases, I'm the enemy.

Black Lives Matter is one iteration of a much larger struggle to fight for black people's freedom.

I want to see us push for economical and educational advancement in communities of color and low-income communities, and I want to see our relationships between our communities and our law enforcement be advanced.

When we address the disparities facing black people, we get a lot closer to a true democracy where all lives matter.

I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.

It is just not something we need to forget easily, to just bend the knee, to put on our t-shirts, Black Lives Matter, and one week after everyone forgets that.