Vice President Biden, choosing the vernacular
In which I cogitate on the ways in which racial language enters the 2012 presidential campaigns through a side door and note the prevailing color patterns and relations in popular media.
Cooking recently for a dinner party and listening to NPR, I heard several times Joe Biden make his now-famous “chains” remark. The vice president, speaking in Danville, Va., said Governor Romney had indicated that he would unleash the big banks and “unchain Wall Street”; doing that, said Joe Biden, would put the audience and, implicitly, much of the rest of the country, “back in chains.”
I listened distractedly—party rhetoric, but Joe’s voice did sound a little odd. As I was stirring the risotto I heard the sound bite again, followed this time by some outraged…