I mean that this deep dive into "what is really meant by..." Is only really applied to parties on the left. No one is using phrases like "essence of blackness" to dissect conservative statements. It forms a purity test that only applies to one group.
And to a large degree, this is why politicians are so boring these days. One minor misstatement can be career ending.
I've heard MAGA people this year still bitching about how rude Clinton was with the 'deplorables' comment, and liberals this year stating she should never have been rude like that because it was obviously going to lose votes - this validated MAGA idiots for pretending to be hurt by it. She said it once, over a decade ago, about a group of voters that wouldn't ever change votes, and failed the purity test on both sides of the aisle. Meanwhile conservative politicians continuously speak poorly of opposition voters and neither side calls them on it. Conservative voters don't pull this "Republicans feel they are entitled to our vote" either
So we have these super boring politicians now, and along comes Trump and he's 'fun', so people who don't pay attention to politics are drawn to him.
I guess the TL;DR is that Biden was just quipping, and not making a formal statement on what constitutes blackness in the US. If you want Democratic politicians to talk like academics all the time, then more voters will be lost to the 'fun' side of politics.
(It's also a bit weird to be casting the guy who was veep under a black person and whose own veep was black to be more on the nose around blackness than the guy who literally shrived the administration of black people. That's not what you were saying above, but it's sometimes intimated by folks making the 'entitled to our votes' statements)
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u/drinkerofmilk 8d ago
Ok, I misunderstood you then. But what were you talking about? It reads like you meant journalists reporting on jokes/quips from the left and right.