Vice President Biden said on Thursday that Americans must confront “institutional racism.”
“No one wants to say that,” he told a National Urban League legislative policy conference in Washington, according to Politico. “I know I sometimes speak out too loudly, sometimes, but I make no apologies for it. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but these are uncomfortable times. We’ve got to shake up the status quo a bit.
{mosads}“You know, we see this institutional racism today in voting, in children’s education, in the very makeup of our neighborhoods, housing patterns, employment, transportation, access to transportation,” he added.
His speech focused on “the overwhelming problems of the legacy of institutional racism which we still live with,” Politico reported.
Biden said the 2008 economic recession had particularly hurt minorities and the impoverished.
“[The] freefall was particularly bad for poor folk and particularly bad for African-American and Hispanic poor folk,” he said.
“You have a disproportionate share of African-Americans living in cities who do not own an automobile,” he added.
“You can’t have a job if you can’t get there to the interview. So we’ve got to put a lot of money into transportation, meaning everything from streetcars to buses to rail transit, connecting inner cities to the suburbs.”
Biden also said that Americans “can’t pretend that children of different races have the same opportunities.”
“I’ll be here with you pushing the next president to level the playing field,” he said.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” Biden joked of his term’s upcoming end. “[I’ll need] career advice from some of you.”
Biden ruled out a third Oval Office bid last October, likely signaling the end of a political career that has spanned four decades.
He concluded that he did not have the time or emotional energy for a viable campaign after the death of his son, Beau Biden, following a battle with brain cancer last year.