Former Vice President Joe Biden bragged to voters in Des Moines, Iowa, about an education effort he supported that taught people in urban America how to code.
“Through a program, we had through community colleges, we can teach people how to code,” Biden said, according to the Washington Examiner. “We went out, literally into the hood, and they found, turns out, 54 [people], they happened to be all women, the vast majority were women of color, no more than a high school degree, aged 25-54, and a third of them only had GEDs.”
It’s not the first time that Biden has told the story of rescuing urban workers by training them how to code.
In 2014, then Vice President Biden told a similar story during a speech at the Chamber of Commerce.
“And there was a group of women from the neighborhood or from the ‘hood. Every one of these women–the youngest was 24, I believe, and the oldest was 58–and there were about two dozen of them,” he marveled.
In 2018, Biden also made headlines for using the word “hood” to describe Detroit neighborhoods.
“So, we went and we hired some folks to go into the neighborhoods and pick 58 women, as it turns out, from the hood, for a 17-week program, if my memory serves me correctly, to learn how to code,” he explained at a Brookings Institution speech. “Not one had more than a high school degree.”