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Updated November 14th, 2021 at 10:51 IST

Biden's speech edited by US channel to suggest he was being racially insensitive

A popular media outlet recently edited a video of US President Joe Biden in a bid to remove context from remarks some could judge as racially insensitive.

Reported by: Bhavya Sukheja
Biden
IMAGE: AP | Image:self
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US media outlet, Fox News, recently edited a video of US President Joe Biden in a bid to remove context from remarks some could judge as racially insensitive. While addressing the crowd at Arlington National Cemetery to mark Veterans Day, Biden spoke about baseball player Satchel Paige, who pitched in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in Major League Baseball.

Biden said he had "adopted the attitude of the great Negro, at the time pitcher in the Negro Leagues, went on to become a great pitcher in the pros in Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson, his name was Satchel Paige”.

While referring to the same, Fox News’ primetime host Sean Hannity said that Biden had “one of his most disturbing, troubling moments to date”. Then, on the ‘Fox & Friends’ morning show, host Rachel Campos Duffy also claimed that the US President was “facing backlash”. Duffy played an edited clip in which Biden was just heard saying that he had “adopted the attitude of the great Negro, pitcher, name was Satch Paige”. 

Biden’s remarks ‘landing him in hot water’?

It is to note that the term “Negro” was once a common way to refer to Black people in organisation names, however, now, “Black” and “African American” are more widely used. Duffy said that Biden’s remarks on Veteran Day were “landing him in hot water”. After the clip was aired, the hashtag #RacistJoeBiden was trending on Twitter. 

Philip Bump, a national correspondent for the Washington Post, explained the reason behind why some commentators on social media described Biden’s speech as having the ‘n-word’. Bump said that by pretending that Biden was calling Paige a ‘Negro’, the media outlet and others on the right were investing in a particular narrative that the use of the term by the Democratic leader was equivalent to a historically racist slur. 

“It comes down to one of the central debates in politics at the moment, the interplay of partisanship and race,” Bump said. 

“There is a sense among many conservatives that the political left is constantly attacking them as racist. The reasons for this are myriad and complicated, rooted to some extent in the overlap of race and partisanship (most Black Americans are Democrats) and in a sense that reevaluations of America’s history through the lens of race are implicitly (or explicitly) about criticizing White Americans,” he further explained. 

(With inputs from AP)

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Published November 14th, 2021 at 10:51 IST

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