Letters: Just what did Joe Biden mean?

Re “Remark sets off campaign accusations,” Aug. 15

Republicans are denouncing Vice President Joe Biden’s statement to a largely black audience that the Republicans are going to “put y’all back in chains.” There were, however, white indentured servants in early America and debtor prisons where poor whites were sent by rich people in England for centuries before that.

But please explain to me what the Republicans mean when they say they want to “take our country back”? The GOP wants nothing to do with George W. Bush, so his presidency is not what they are referring to. So whom did President Obama, the nation’s first black president, take America from? Now that’s a true racial overtone in a campaign slogan.

Robert S. Henry

San Gabriel

The Times reports that Biden said, to an audience that included many African Americans, that Mitt Romney’s banking policies would “put y’all back in chains.” Someone should remind Biden that it was a Republican president who unshackled those chains nearly 150 years ago.

Orrin Turbow

Oxnard

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