U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-Cal.) landed a devastating punch right on the chin of former vice president and leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest, Joe Biden. Going into this bout, Harris started with an advantage. She was born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother. So, through the purblind eyes of the Democratic Party and the media that makes her “African-American.” That also affords her the presumption that she’s the victim of racism and confirms upon her the authority to declare what’s racist. And she did just that.

Biden, on the other hand, is an Irish-American who’s about as white as St. Patrick’s beard. He never had a chance against Harris. When Harris declared, “I do not believe you are a racist, but...” you knew what was coming next; the implication that he is. She blasted Biden for lauding the “civility” of white, segregationist senators and working with them to oppose busing for little black girls like her. Biden faltered in response. His claim that he only opposed forced busing by the department of education is false; that agency didn’t exist during his biggest anti-busing fights in the mid-1970s. And, his unsubstantiated claim that he supported busing on a voluntary basis is belied by his strong denunciation of its very premise.

Biden became a U.S. senator in 1973 during the highly controversial next wave in the civil rights movement after the famous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision holding segregated public schools violate the U.S. Constitution. Schools across America were then required to desegregate. But integration was a bridge too far for many. Because schools in many parts of the country were slow-to-no-go about integrating themselves, advocates filed lawsuits in federal courts to force them. A federal court in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, found that the white suburban schools outside Wilmington were complicit in racial discrimination and ordered they be integrated. How? By busing black children from the inner city into the white suburban schools and busing suburban white children into the black inner-city schools.

Many white suburban school parents were outraged by the decision. As Biden explained in his 2007 autobiography, “White parents were terrified that their children would be shipped to the toughest neighborhoods in Wilmington…” He wrote about when he walked into a town meeting at the local school gym as a young U.S. Senator he heard people say, “There he is… Goddam Biden… Kill the sonofabitch.” Biden quickly made it clear that he was on the side of the white suburban parents. He called forced busing “a liberal train wreck,” “racist” and “asinine;” he even supported a constitutional amendment to stop it.

Biden stated back then, “The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist!” Biden was right. The assumption by busing advocates that blacks are inferior and can only rise academically if they sit beside whites in school, perhaps getting smarter through osmosis, is absurd.

The reason for Kamala Harris’ academic success is not because she rubbed shoulders with whites in the integrated Berkeley public schools, it’s because she had highly educated and accomplished parents who instilled in her the importance of education and she worked hard in school. Yet like so many things in life, the real causes of social problems are ignored by liberal activists with a political agenda. Busing activists fought to establish an equal racial composition in public schools regardless of its educational merits or its effect on the students, black and white. They pushed so hard they caused massive blow back. Back then Biden saw which way the winds were blowing and got behind them; he will again today.

In recent years, the Democratic Party has moved far to the left, leaving centrists like Biden not only without support but stunned to be on the receiving end of those same false charges of racism he so freely leveled against Republicans, Biden learned in real time that in a Democratic Party debate a white man cannot win an argument about race with a black woman holding a giant race card. Biden will soon renounce his past opposition to busing and racial quotas. He’ll do this in the vain attempt to hang on to his lead among black Democratic primary voters. All that will do is speed up the day of his ultimate political demise.

Marc A. Scaringi, Esq. Mr. Scaringi is an attorney in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a radio talk show host of “The Marc Scaringi Show” on WHP 580AM and I Heart Radio and a Donald J. Trump endorsed Delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention. Follow Marc on Twitter @MarcScaringi