Cory Booker's great response to Biden's "Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There's not a racist bone in my body."

Booker's response: "For someone to show the lack of understanding or sensitivity to even know when they've made a mistake, and to fall into that defensive posture and said, 'I'm not apologizing' — that I should apologize to him! — is really problematic.… The fact that he has said something that an African-American man could find very offensive, and then to turn around and say, 'I'm not a racist! You should apologize to me!' … As Angela Davis used to say, in a time of racism, it is not enough to say that 'I'm not a racist'; you need to be anti-racist. What we need from a former vice president, from a presidential candidate, what we need from each other is to be allies, to be seeking understanding, to be seeking empathy.… So for his posture to me to be, 'I've done nothing wrong; you should apologize to me; I'm not a racist,' is so insulting, and so missing the the larger point that he should not have to have explained to him."

I'm reading these quotes this morning at my son John's Facebook page.

Biden's "Apologize for what?" came after Booker criticized him for saying "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me 'boy'; he always called me 'son'" (and so forth). Booker's response to that was "You don't joke about calling black men 'boys.' "

Neither of those remarks makes complete sense. Why was Biden impressed that Eastland called him "son" and not "boy"? Biden isn't black. I guess Biden was just thinking about the way old men might patronize young men by addressing them as "son" and not thinking about the much more denigrating use of "boy" to address black men. That's the only sensible interpretation, really, but it does show Biden's a bit out of touch. It's unsympathetic to regard that as a "joke about calling black men 'boys.'" Not only is it unlikely that Biden was referring to the old practice of calling black men "boys," it doesn't at all look like any kind of joke.

But Cory Booker is running for President, and he's running way behind Joe Biden. He has to grab for an issue when he can. He got a lot of attention and he really hurt Biden. But he did it by deliberately pretending to misunderstand Biden (or possibly, by actually misunderstanding Biden, which is much less likely). Booker could have said, instead of "You don't joke about calling black men 'boys,'" something more like: Biden is so out of touch about race that he talks about an old segregationist calling him "son" and not "boy" without even noticing how bad that sounds to anyone who remembers the way black men were called "boy."

The newer statement from Booker is much better formulated. Quite impressive, I think. And he would never have said it if Biden hadn't gone big with, "Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There's not a racist bone in my body."

Biden's instincts are bad! And his rhetoric is almost babyish. And clichéd — "not a racist bone in my body." That's a silly metaphor, the idea that character traits are located in particular bones. And it's also the sort of thing you say about someone else when you're vouching for them. You can't claim it for yourself. The dumbest part of Biden's statement is that it turned all eyes on Booker, who's been struggling to get some attention, and Booker took advantage.

I particularly like "it is not enough to say that 'I'm not a racist'; you need to be anti-racist." It's not that helpful to bring up Angela Davis, but the sentiment is a good one. Maybe the conversation about race would go better if we stopped accusing people of being "racist" and only criticized them for not being  anti-racist enough.