Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said in remarks on Wednesday that the Latino community is “incredibly diverse,” “unlike” the Black community.
“Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things,” Biden said. “You go to Florida, you find a very different attitude about immigration than you do in Arizona. So it’s a very diverse community.”
Biden made the remark during an interview hosted by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Association of Black Journalists that was released in full on Thursday. His remarks on diversity were a response to question from NPR reporter Lulu Garcia Navarro, who asked if Biden would engage with Cuba.
President Donald Trump quickly attacked Biden over the remark, calling it an example of “condescending white liberal racism.”
Katrina Pierson, a Trump campaign adviser, said in a statement that the former vice president “tells a group of Black reporters that ‘you all know’ that Black people think alike. There’s a reason Joe Biden can’t count on the support of Black voters and it’s because of his plantation owner mentality.”
“Joe Biden would rather we all just shut up, get in line, and know our place,” she said.
The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Elsewhere in Biden’s interview with the journalism associations, Biden bristled at a reporter’s question about whether he has taken a cognitive test akin to the one Trump has bragged about acing. Biden replied to the question from CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett, who is Black, by saying “That’s like saying to you, before you got on this program if you had taken a test were you taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”
Biden’s campaign defended those comments by calling Barnett’s question “preposterous” and “deserving of a response that showed the absurdity of it all.”
Biden also drew criticism last May for saying that “you ain’t Black” if “you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump.” The Democratic candidate made the remarks during an interview with The Breakfast Club, a nationally syndicated radio show, and later apologized for the remark.
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