Institutional racism is a “white man’s problem” in America, former Vice President Joe Biden said on Tuesday.

In a 90-minute interview with a small group of reporters at a campaign office in downtown Washington, Biden said racism has always been in America and white supremacists have always existed.

“It’s real,” he said. “It’s there, and the only way — from the founding of this country to today — you deal with it is you attack it. You expose it. You embarrass it. You put people in jail when they engage in things that are illegal when they’re doing it — you call them out. And most of all, you call it out to our children.”

“Silence,” he warned, “is complicity.”

Biden launched his White House bid in April singularly focused on defeating President Donald Trump in 2020. His campaign launch video included footage of a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and criticism of Trump for initially claiming that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the clash, which turned fatal.

Hate crimes have risen under Trump’s administration, and the president has been blamed for emboldening white supremacists with his rhetoric — a connection he adamantly rejects.

“What presidents say matter. Words matter,” Biden stressed on Tuesday. “They can make markets rise and fall, they can send people to war, they can, in fact, enliven a nation, they can enrich a nation, they can, in fact, also appeal to the worst damn instincts in human nature. And we possess those instincts in human nature, and it’s overwhelmingly a white man’s problem visited on people of color.”

Biden said he puts white people in three categories: “those who are flat just prejudiced and are supremacists to some degree”; “folks who are agnostic and don’t give a damn about it”; and “folks who think we should just do something about it.”

Biden added that while he wouldn’t try to tell his attorney general what to do — a clear jab at Trump’s attempts to control former Attorney General Jeff Sessions — he would “make absolutely clear” to his Justice Department that white supremacy won’t be tolerated in a Biden administration.

“He’s crossed a line so far, even those people who want to go like this,” Biden said, covering his eyes with his hands, “aren’t able to do it anymore.”

Another Democratic candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., used similar language earlier this month in challenging white Americans to confront racism.

“If there’s anything we’ve learned in the last few days,” Buttigieg told a conference of black journalists and communications professionals in Miami in the aftermath of mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, “systemic racism is a white problem.”