There are many reasons to believe that Joe Biden should not be the next president — but his 1970s-era opposition to busing as a means to school desegregation should not be one of them.
There's little doubt that this could prove to be a litmus test for the current generation of race-conscious Democrats. Northwestern history professor Brett Gadsden has begun to make this case against Biden in Politico: “A sincere critique of Biden's busing record would require a broader reckoning of the Democratic Party's — and by extension the nation's — abandonment of this central goal of the civil rights movement.” Of course, to agree one must accept the idea that busing was rightly a central civil-rights goal — and that those who opposed it were irredeemably racist.
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