President Joe Biden used a speech honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday to stoke racial division, accusing car insurance companies of being racist for charging different rates based on location.
“If you live in one of those neighborhoods and you have the same exact car I have in the other neighborhood, you pay more for your insurance than that side,” Biden said sternly. “No basis for it! None at all other than you’re black, and I’m white.”
The president spoke about race at a breakfast to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, hosted by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.
He also accused housing values of being racist, vowing to tackle the racial disparities that exist in the real estate market.
Biden said:
You know if you build, in the last 25 years, if you build a housing development on one side of an interstate highway and you built the same one on the opposite side and one is predominantly black and the other is predominately white, guess what? The value of the exact same home built by the exact same builder is more valuable on the white side of that highway than the white side. That’s a fact.
He vowed to take “meaningful affirmative steps to overcome the patterns of segregation,” adding that “a black family’s homes often appraise at a much lower value than the same home owned by white families.”
The president spoke about cleaning up urban communities suffering from pollution and directing 40 percent of his infrastructure spending to “disadvantaged communities” so they would reap the benefits.
Biden also boasted of increasing funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), pointing out that the students there were just as talented as other students in better-funded universities.
“The folks at HBCUs are as competent as anyone else. But guess what? They don’t have the laboratories. They don’t have the funding,” Biden said.