Biden Condemns America’s ‘White Man’s Culture’
Former vice president Joe Biden apologized Tuesday for presiding over Justice Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing and condemned the “white man’s culture” that he believes led a group of white lawmakers to aggressively press Anita Hill on the specifics of her sexual assault allegation against the nominee.
“To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to give her the kind of hearing she deserved,” he said Tuesday night at a New York City event celebrating students who fight sexual assault on college campuses. “I wish I could have done something.”
Biden, who chaired the Judiciary Committee during the Thomas confirmation hearings, has been confronted with a rash of criticism over his handling of the hearings since he began to explore a run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
During his speech, Biden argued that the hearings — during which Hill faced aggressive and sometimes derisive questioning from, in Biden’s words, “a bunch of white guys,” — were broadly reflective of the American system of jurisprudence, which he believes unfairly advantages white men at the expense of other demographics.
“It’s an English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change,” he said.
The former Vice President devoted a significant part of his remarks to condemning violence against women, particularly that which happens on college campuses, by drawing on his own experience as a fraternity member in college.
“No man has a right to lay a hand on a woman, no matter what she’s wearing, she does, who she is, unless it’s in self-defense. Never,” he said Tuesday.
“If you see a brother taking an inebriated co-ed up the stairs at a fraternity house and you don’t go and stop it, you’re a damn coward,” he added. “You don’t deserve to be called a man.”
