He is also a Democrat. The White House’s response, “he doesn’t have a point.”

Via Politico:

Former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder had harsh words for Vice President Joe Biden a day after Biden told a rally in Virginia — which included a significant number of African-Americans in the audience — that Republicans and Wall Street are going to put “y’all back in chains.”

“Slavery is nothing to joke about,” Wilder said Wednesday on Fox News’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” “And the history of this nation’s involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.”

President Barack Obama has defended his No. 2, and Biden says he was using the GOP’s own words to make a point.

“When you make a statement that says, ‘They are going to put y’all back in chains,’ that means, ‘I’m OK. It is not going to happen to me. We’ll work through it, but y’all would be in chains,’” said Wilder, a Democrat and the first African-American elected to gubernatorial office in the U.S.

He added later, “Let’s give [Biden] the benefit of the doubt by saying, ‘Well, he didn’t mean all of it,’ and his apologists are already out there saying it. But you can’t continue to make gaffe after gaffe after gaffe and believe that it’s going to be supportive of what you and the president are both trying to do.”