The Los Angeles Times reports Tuesday, on the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, that President Joe Biden has “struggle[d] to make progress on racial issues,” despite making the Black Lives Matter movement central to his 2020 campaign.
Floyd’s family arrived at the White House on Tuesday, the anniversary of his death. But there was to be no bill-signing ceremony. Bipartisan negotiations on Capitol Hill have yet to produce a breakthrough, a reminder of the steep hurdles that Biden faces confronting the country’s entrenched racial problems and its political polarization.
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When Biden declared victory over President Trump after November’s election, he said he had won a mandate “to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country.” He marked a rare moment of progress last week when he signed legislation to address hate crimes against Asian Americans, which have increased during the pandemic because the coronavirus originated in China.
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Biden set Tuesday as a goal for passing legislation, to mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died in a Minneapolis street, his neck pinned for nine and a half minutes under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer.
Though the Times adds that bipartisan negotiations on a police reform bill are ongoing, many journalists at the White House briefing room appeared to regard the progress thus far as insufficient.
Moreover, despite signing a bill against anti-Asian hate crimes last week, Biden waited nearly a week before condemning a spate of antisemitic attacks around the nation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, We Told You So!: The First 100 Days of Joe Biden’s Radical Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.