After a campaign full of questions, advancing racial equality has been a foundation of Biden’s presidency so far

After several Democratic presidential candidates — including then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), now Biden’s vice president — criticized the former lawmaker’s record on race issues, Biden defended himself at an NAACP forum, noting that his career had passed the vetting process of Barack Obama, the first Black president.

“They did a significant background check,” Biden said in July 2019. “I doubt he would have picked me if these accusations about me being wrong on civil rights was correct.”

Now that he is president, his commitment to those issues will get the ultimate test. It’s notable that one major thread running through his first weeks in office has been putting racial inequality and inequities front and center through his policies, his hires and his rhetoric.

A video Biden’s team posted Tuesday marking his first two weeks in office highlighted that the president signed four “racial equity” executive orders; noted his inauguration speech, which mentioned his desire to combat systemic racism; and featured some of the history-making members of his Cabinet, including Lloyd Austin, the first Black defense secretary.

He signed three executive orders intended to address economic conditions that keep people of color from experiencing many of the same American ideals as their White counterparts. The Biden administration pledged to work with Congress to pass legislation that would increase funding for minority-owned small businesses. And he signed an executive order that sought to strengthen anti-discrimination policies in the area where most Americans build their wealth: homeownership.

“I’m not promising we can end it tomorrow, but I promise you: We’re going to continue to make progress to eliminate systemic racism, and every branch of the White House and the federal government is going to be part of that effort,” Biden said when signing those orders.

Biden is seeking to battle racism’s economic effects in a slew of other areas, including the role of private prisons in the high incarceration rates of Black Americans and how inadequate funding of historically Black colleges often saddles students with debt that perpetuates the racial wealth gap.

“For too many American families, systemic racism and inequality in our economy, laws and institutions still put the American Dream far out of reach,” said Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser. “Today, the average Black family has just one-tenth the wealth of the average White family, while the gap between White and Black in homeownership is now larger than it was in 1960.”

People of color overwhelmingly backed Biden — and the first Black and Asian American vice president in history — and the president sought to communicate quickly after arriving in the White House that this support was not taken for granted. Following an administration that was known for its lack of diversity at the top levels of government, Biden has assembled the most diverse Cabinet in history.

The president has also sought to hold companies accountable for their role in polluting communities of color as a part of environmental justice efforts led by Michael Regan, who would be the first Black man to serve as Environmental Protection Agency administrator if confirmed.

Much of the conversation in the presidential election about systemic racism has centered on the real economic anxiety of people of color over how much less financially secure they are than White Americans. At the root is how centuries of policies made wealth difficult — if not impossible — to acquire because of policies that discriminated against people of color. Reparations, compensating the descendants of Black people enslaved in the United States, is an idea that gained some headlines early in the 2020 campaign as candidates discussed the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Africans to the Colonies. In a 2019 Washington Post-SSRS poll, two-thirds of Americans said the legacy of slavery still affects society.

During the campaign, Biden said he would support a committee studying the feasibility of reparations — an idea supported by only 1 in 5 Americans, according to a 2020 Reuters-Ipsos poll. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) introduced a bill last month that would form a commission to examine the issue. Biden has not discussed the topic of reparations since winning the election, but how he responds might be viewed as a test of his commitment to closing the wealth gap between Black and White Americans.

Organizations that address racial inequality in various areas have applauded Biden’s efforts to move the country in the opposite direction of where the country was going under President Donald Trump but largely view them as just a start.

Lisa Rice, president and chief executive of the National Fair Housing Alliance, told The Post that civil rights groups have a detailed timeline laying out when they expect to see the administration’s executive orders “come to fruition.”

“You can tell me all day long you want to advance racial equality, but if I don’t see you doing substantive things like encouraging lending institutions to develop special-purpose credit programs, then I begin to wonder if this wasn’t just all talk,” she said. “Changing the policies is one thing. Now you’ve got to implement them.”

In their effort to address racial inequities, Biden — and his top-level aides — might do more to explain how racial injustice harms all Americans. This could be key to getting buy-in on a topic that is often polarizing for many Americans, particularly those who are more conservative.

But regardless of how unpopular discussing racial inequities might be in some corners of America, many people of color — a bloc that was key to delivering the White House for Biden — will be looking for more than executive orders to continue the changes they hoped to see years ago when they first sent Biden to the White House with the first Black president.