President Joe Biden used a racial slur to describe Maryland’s first Black governor in a speech on Wednesday.
Speaking to an audience of IBEW union workers in Lanham, Biden used the word “boy,” a term considered a racial epithet when used to describe black men, to refer to newly-elected Democrat Gov. Wes Moore.
“You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” he said. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.”
Moore, 44, was elected governor of Maryland in a landslide vote during the 2022 midterm elections last November. He played wide receiver on the Johns Hopkins University football team when he was a student.
Biden has previously been called out for using the racially charged word. During his campaign trail in 2019, he used “boy” to describe his ability to work with segregationist senators.
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said at a Manhattan fundraiser, referring to the white supremacist senator from Mississippi. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker blasted Biden’s use of “boy” following his speech in New York, warning him not to “joke about calling black men ‘boys,’”
“This is about him invoking a terrible power dynamic that he showed a lack of understanding or insensitivity to by invoking this idea that he was called ‘son’ by white segregationists who, yeah, they see in him their son,” Booker said at the time.
“That’s why again I felt it really important especially with our friends not to just sweep things under the rug but to be candid and straightforward with each other,” he added.
Biden has also applied the term to men of different races in the past. In 2021, the commander-in-chief clumsily congratulated Japanese golfer Hideki Matsuyama on his victory at a press conference.
“You’ve got a Japanese boy coming over here and guess what? He won the Masters. He won the Masters. He won the green jacket,” Biden told Matsuyama, who was 29 years old.
