A Cautionary Tale from Joe Biden, Jr.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden faced a few challenges when he was a kid, chief among them the likelihood of stuttering when thrown into a new situation or when asked to speak in front of others. Nicknamed Joe Impedimenta by his Latin class schoolmates (impedimenta – “the baggage that impedes one’s progress”); Biden received an exemption from public speaking his high school freshman year because of the stuttering issue. Every other student had to make a presentation at the morning assembly in front of 250 boys, but Biden got a pass. Believing other kids then looked at him like he was stupid; the young Biden reportedly set about to prove he was just like everybody else.

And now….look at the profession he has chosen! Who speaks up more than attorneys do? Today Biden seems always to be talking – even recklessly at times, affording him additional opportunities to keep on talking…and talking, if for no other reason than to correct his errors.

Not unlike his father who eventually sold used cars, Biden found success in selling political agendas, using words in abundance to deliver a point of view and/or to create a vision of the future desired by his constituents. First elected to the Senate in 1972, he has since been reelected six more times and will soon become the first Roman Catholic Vice President of the United States.

In fact, Biden emerged as a natural leader when he was relatively young. While still in high school, he participated in an anti-segregation sit-in at a Wilmington theatre, taking a position against discrimination even as a teenager – and long before it was popular.

Perhaps Biden was more able than most to recognize the presence of discrimination, thanks to experiences in his own life. Beginning with peers who teased him for stuttering and later witnessing family members belittle his father's lack of financial success, Biden is more than philosophically familiar with intolerance.

Birth order theory suggests that first borns, more readily than latter borns, recognize and identify with the productivity strivings of the father. Although Joe Biden’s father was said to be quite prosperous earlier in his life, he was not doing well by the time Joe, Jr. was born.

Joe Biden remembers the early and mostly Protestant neighborhood his father chose for the family to call home. Filled with families of young professionals just starting out at DuPont, most were young, college-educated men working as chemists, accountants, and lawyers. It didn’t take long for Biden, Jr., to label his father “a fish out of water” by comparison. His father was not college educated and not able to see such a hopeful future for his own family. Interestingly, the younger Biden is today ranked as one of the least wealthy members of the Senate – perhaps an inadvertent pledge of allegiance to the senior Biden, our VP-elect's first and most influential role model.

Back in the late 40’s, and due to his father’s financial difficulties, the Biden family was forced to move into the house where Joe Biden’s mom grew up. During this bleak period, his mother’s brothers, the “Finnegan boys,” gave their struggling brother-in-law a really hard time. Joe Biden, Jr., probably took it all in; including, of course, the following exchange with Aunt Gertie.

I remember being up in Aunt Gertie’s musty room on the third floor one night. She was beside me, scratching my back. “Now, honey,” she said, “your father is not a bad man.” This, of course, had never occurred to me. “Your father is not a bad man. He’s just English. But he’s a good man.”

Of interest to Thinkwriter is looking behind the curtain of Joe Biden’s early recollection to identify his worldview.

So, here we go.

Biden’s memory is notable in its simplicity and message. As if by second nature, Aunt Gertie uses ordinary conversation in an attempt to sell a little bigotry to the impressionable Biden. She wants him to recognize what everybody else already knows (according to her): The English are somehow less than the Irish. In effect, “I’ll scratch your back . . . and you’ll be scratching mine when we agree the Irish are better than the English.” She likely wanted to say. . . “How could your father possibly do any better than he’s doing? He’s not Irish!” (Worse yet. . . he's English!)

And as she speaks, Aunt Gertie puncuates her bias with an obsequious back rub, a gesture intended to anchor her point of view in the boy's psyche. From Gertie's lips to Joey’s ears . . . and (it is hoped) . . .from Gertie's lips to Joey’s now better understanding of the problem with Papa Biden: He’s not really "bad;" he’s English.

But hold on. Most significant to the identification of Biden’s worldview is Biden’s spontaneous reflection - “This, of course, had never occurred to me.” In other words, it had never occurred to Biden that his father could or would be labeled ‘a bad man’ or that Biden's father would be called ‘bad’ (at all) or 'bad' because he is English. The idea that goodness or badness should or would be determined, or not, by one’s nationality (or race) is something Biden, Jr. cannot buy (then or now).

Bottom line: Aunt Gertie's “upstairs, musty room deal” never made it out of committee.

Indeed, in Biden’s early recollection we can see and appreciate the insidious nature of indiscriminate discrimination – and how it so easily and seamlessly travels from one generation to the next – passing right through us . . . to the most vulnerable among us. In truth, we all are guilty of delivering these so-called “innocent,” yet biased innuendos along to others. Perhaps we are wise to remember Biden's worldview: Discrimination never sleeps. No matter how many well-crafted workplace and institutional standards of behavior receive the "green light seal of approval," for example, human nature is always awake. When it comes to intolerance, individual people are what make the real difference (or not).