

At an event on Tuesday night, Joe Biden recalled with fondness his time serving in the Senate with some of the South’s staunchest defenders of segregation, calling it a time of “civility” and “get[ting] things done.” Can this man go away, now? Please?
Addressing a crowd at a fundraiser in New York, Biden spoke about his belief in unity and bipartisanship. And showing his incredible political acumen, he decided to illustrate his point by sharing just how well he got along with two of the Senate’s biggest defenders of white supremacy during the 1960s and 70s, fellow Democrats James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia. From the New York Times:
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Mr. Biden said, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
He called Mr. Talmadge “one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.”
“Well guess what?” Mr. Biden continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”
Some advice for Biden: it is not a compliment for a southerner to call you “son,” it’s a genteel way of asserting your place in the pecking order. And don’t get me started on why he didn’t use the derogative slur “boy” on Biden (you’re white, dude!!!).
In case you need a refresher on who these dead white men were, James Eastland was seen throughout his political career as “a symbol of Southern resistance to racial desegregation. He had a penchant for calling black people an “inferior race” and pontificating about how segregation “promotes racial harmony,” as he did in this snippet from a speech he gave: