Booker admonishes Biden for language used defending a ‘kid wearing a hoodie’

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) took issue with the language used by fellow presidential contender Joe Biden on Friday when the former vice president said that a “kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gangbanger.”

Biden made the remark Friday during a speech a day after engaging in a tense exchange with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) over racial school busing at the Democratic primary debate on Thursday.

{mosads}“We’ve got to recognize that kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gangbanger. Ladies and gentlemen, there are too many black men, and I might add women, in prison,” Biden said in Chicago.

But Booker took issue with Biden’s comment, without specifying which portion of Biden’s remarks the New Jersey senator disagreed with.

“This isn’t about a hoodie. It’s about a culture that sees a problem with a kid wearing a hoodie in the first place. Our nominee needs to have the language to talk about race in a far more constructive way,” Booker tweeted.

This isn’t about a hoodie. It’s about a culture that sees a problem with a kid wearing a hoodie in the first place. Our nominee needs to have the language to talk about race in a far more constructive way. https://t.co/c2BFSSOHro

— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 28, 2019

Some critics echoed the New Jersey Democrat’s admonishment, calling out the use of the word “gangbanger” as having a racial component.

Biden’s campaign did not provide comment about the pushback Friday.

Booker’s Friday tweet comes after he called out Biden last week when the former vice president positively invoked his work with two segregationist senators.

In remarks at a fundraiser, Biden had reminisced about working with Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.) and Sen. Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.) in the Senate decades ago, saying Eastland never called him “boy.”

“You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys.’ Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity,” Booker said in a statement.