Kenosha:Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism, drawing a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a reckoning that has galvanized the nation.
“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family.
The visit marked the former vice president's first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee. While Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family, Trump didn't mention Blake during his trip to Kenosha on Tuesday. Where Biden traced problems in the criminal justice system back to slavery, Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism and offered his unvarnished support to law enforcement, blaming the recent violence on “domestic terror.”
“I can’t say if tomorrow God made me President, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Biden said. "But it would be a whole better, we’d get a whole lot further down the road if Trump isn’t re-elected."
Read |Facebook curbs political ads for 7 days before US election
“There are certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to — but we’re not going to lose.”
Blake remains hospitalized after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him on Aug. 23. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.
Also |Trump tells supporters to vote two times
Outside Grace Lutheran, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Trump’s and Biden’s respective visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.
Justin Blake called Biden more of a unifier and credited the Democrat for bringing up criminal justice changes before being asked. But Justin Blake said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”
Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered searing accounts of their struggles.
Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Biden she's “tired” at just 31 years old and worried for her three young, Black children. “For so many decades we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding that she's heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”
Biden answered that, because he's white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”
But he compared the current era of cell phone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil rights protesters being beaten more than a half-century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non-whites.