Sean 'Diddy' Combs, Other Black Leaders Tell Joe Biden: 'No Black VP, No Vote'

Over 100 black leaders, including Sean “Diddy” Combs, signed a letter to Democrat hopeful Joe Biden instructing him to choose his vice presidential candidate wisely. According to them, they might vote for Trump if he doesn’t. “Failing to select a Black woman in 2020 means YOU WILL lose the election, we don’t want to choose between the lesser of two evils, we don’t want to vote the devil we know vs. the devil we don’t because we’re tired of voting for devils period.”

The letter excoriated Biden for his role in a string of crime bills that negatively affected generations of black people convicted of crimes, leading to longer sentencing and higher incarceration rates.

Have Democrat party leaders, allies, or donors ever required Joe Biden to show remorse for the 1986 or the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse bills which established mandatory minimum sentencing and subsequently crack cocaine sentencing disparities, and by his own admission, led to mass incarceration? What about the 1994 Crime Bill?

Hillary Clinton is famous for defending the 1994 crime bill by calling young black men “super predators.” I was wondering when black Americans would figure out who was behind the mass incarceration effort in this country.

NEW: More than 100 Black male leaders sign letter demanding Joe Biden pick Black woman as VP. “Failing to select a Black woman … means YOU WILL lose the election … Black women are defining the future of politics so it's time you let one define the future of your campaign.” pic.twitter.com/HOJs0d8q8h

— Kat Stafford (@kat__stafford) August 10, 2020

But it’s a strange thing for these leaders, who know the depth of Joe Biden’s role in the mass incarceration of black people, to even consider voting for him—even with a black VP. What difference would that make? The VP does next to nothing. We all know she would just be killing time before the next election, where she would be a hopeful candidate. But why settle for Old Gropey Joe (who has a terrible record on justice) when they should be pressuring the DNC to give them a real candidate and not one who can’t remember he voted for mass incarceration.

Either way, they’re in for a disappointment. The Democrats have never cared about the plight of black Americans unless it’s how to get them to the polls for an election they want to win. The everyday problems of black Americans are often exacerbated by Democrat policies like the various crime bills that increased sentencing for minor drug offenses or the refusal to allow school choice, which keeps black children in failing schools. This will not change in a Biden presidency.

If black people are looking for a president to reform the justice system, they need to look no further than the one in the Oval Office right now. President Trump was the first president to sign criminal justice reform since the disastrous 1994 bill. The First Step Act let thousands of people out of jail early, most of them minorities. One should ask, why didn’t the Lightbringer Obama do it during his eight years? Asking his washed-up VP to come up with more reform at the end of his doddering life is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? Especially when he spent most of his life lobbying for tougher sentencing.

If your issue in this election is criminal justice reform, the candidate who cares about it is the incumbent, not the guy hiding in his basement—whose only connections to black people are weird stories about threatening a guy named Corn Pop at a pool where the kids liked to touch his hairy legs. Oh, how I wish I was kidding.

While the letter is a good start, the authors need to continue the thought process all the way through. A black VP won’t solve their problem. Joe Biden and the Democrat Party are the problems. When one party has a lock on an entire race of people, even when they betray them repeatedly, what they need is a scary wake-up call, and to find out on Election Day that the people they thought were a lock are swing voters. That’s what gets attention. Kick a few big-league Dems who “can’t lose” out of office because the black vote didn’t show up and suddenly they’ll start listening. But if the black voting block continues to vote Democrat no matter what is done to them, there will never be any progress.