Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden admitted in an interview Sunday night with ABC News’s Robin Roberts that he should not have suggested that voters who were undecided about supporting him or President Donald Trump “ain’t black.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Biden told Roberts when asked about the remark.
“I was trying to make the point, [Trump] is a man that spent his entire career denigrating African Americans. The truth is, there is a fundamental difference between Donald Trump and me on the issue of race across the board,” Biden said. “I’m not gonna try to divide people.”
Biden faced a lot of backlash in May when he made remarks during a tense radio interview with The Breakfast Club host Charlamagne tha God.
It started 17 minutes into the radio program when one of Biden’s aides was trying to cut the interview short when the host replied, “You can’t do that to black media.”
Biden stressed that his wife had to be somewhere and suggested he had to go, regardless of whether he was dealing with “white” or “black” media.
“Uh, oh … I’m in trouble,” he joked as he referred to interfering with his wife’s schedule.
Then Charlamagne asked him to come back onto the radio program, telling him, “It’s a long way to November. We’ve got more questions.”
As Biden tried to defend his record with the black community during a rapid-fire series of questioning, he suggested that voters undecided about supporting him or Trump “ain’t black.”
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” Biden told Charlamagne.
The host responded, “It don’t have nothing to do with Trump, it has to do with the fact — I want something for my community.”
Both black conservatives and black progressives criticized Biden for his remarks, calling them “racist.”
That was not the only head-scratching remark during that interview with Charlamagne. Biden, in that same interview, also suggested that people in jail “can’t read” without offering any explanation.