MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry: Biden has been Obama’s ‘sherpa to blackness’

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In comparing Vice President Joe Biden’s appearance at the NAACP convention Thursday to Mitt Romney’s on her show Sunday, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry said it cracked her up to see Biden emerge as President Barack Obama’s “sherpa to blackness for the first African-American president.”

During his speech, Biden noted he was a lifetime member of the NAACP and called out to a friend in the audience from Delaware he referred to as “Mouse.”

“He was like, ‘Hey Mouse! What’s going on, Mouse?’ I was like, ‘is this happening?’,” Harris-Perry explained to her panelists Sunday, after calling him the “most racially authentic” of the two speakers.

“What people don’t know is that he helped ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), an international human rights treaty that would not have become law if it had not been for Joe Biden’s strong, aggressive leadership,” panelist Wade Henderson, referring to a treaty that was ratified by the U.S. in 1994. “He’s done more to advance the interests of African-Americans through legislative means than most people recognize.”

Joy-Ann Reid, managing editor of The Grio.com, pointed out that Biden’s NAACP appearance followed a speech at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, as he became Obama’s “black surrogate.”

Watch video from The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, aired July 15, below:

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[image via Agence France-Presse]