Former United States Vice President, Joe Biden says white Americans need to acknowledge and admit the fact that systemic racism still exists in the country and must be rooted out.

Speaking in Washington DC during MLK breakfast programme on Monday in honour of Martin Luther King Jr., Biden expressed confidence that positive change was on its way.

“The bottom line is we have a lot to root out but most of all the systematic racism that most of us whites don’t like to acknowledge even exists. We don’t even consciously acknowledge it. But it’s been built into every aspect of our system,” Biden said at the event hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton.

“There’s something we have to admit, not you, we, white America has to admit there’s still a systematic racism.”

“Because when your schools are substandard, when your houses are undervalued, when your car insurance costs more for no apparent reason, when poverty rates for black Americans is still twice that of white Americans, there’s something we have to admit.”

Referencing the historic nature of the presidential inauguration he attended 10 years ago when Barack Obama became the nation’s first African-American president, Biden continued:

“There I was, it just hit me, standing, waiting for a black man to come 28 miles from Philadelphia to pick me up and take me on a 128-mile ride to be sworn in as president and vice president of the  United States. Don’t tell me, don’t tell me things can’t change!” Biden said.

The 76-year-old Biden has been the subject of intense speculation over whether or not he would mount a presidential campaign in 2020 to try to unseat President Donald Trump.