words by Charles Brooks
Update: On August 11th, Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his Vice-President. Read the update on the Brooks Blackboard post here.
Ever since Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic party nominee said he would nominate a woman as his vice-president, there’s been much anticipation around who he would pick as his running mate. In fact, not long after Biden made his announcement during the March 15th primary debate did he start to feel the pressure to pick a black woman as his vice-president that only intensified in the wake of the nationwide racial “reckoning” due to the police killing of George Floyd. Interestingly enough, polling results supports this - in a
Yahoo!News/You Gov poll 62% responded it was the right decision for Biden to pledge VP woman pick – Blacks (
83%), white (
59%), and Latino (
64%);
36% overall and
61% Blacks said it’s important to pick a woman of color. In another poll, the
USA Today\Suffolk poll,
35% Democrats said it was "very important" to them that his running mate be a woman of color; and
37% said it was "somewhat important." Incredibly though, the polling shows
75% of whites said it was very or somewhat important to them compared to
60% for Blacks. Rep. Clyburn (D-SC) affirms the importance when he told
NBC News, "I really believe that we've reached a point in this country where African American women need to be rewarded for the loyalty that they've given to this party."
